TODAY IN HISTORY

1901: Britain’s Queen Victoria died at age 81 after a reign of 63 years; she was succeeded by her eldest son, Edward VII.

1907: The Richard Strauss opera “Salome” made its American debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York; its racy content sparked outrage and forced cancellation of additional performances.

1944: During World War II, Allied forces began landing at Anzio, Italy.

1970: The first regularly scheduled commercial flight of the Boeing 747 began in New York and ended in London some 6½ hours later.

1973: On Jan. 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its Roe v. Wade decision, declared a nationwide constitutional right to abortion. Former President Lyndon B. Johnson died at his Texas ranch at age 64. George Foreman upset reigning heavyweight champion Joe Frazier with a second round TKO in their match in Kingston, Jamaica.

1987: Pennsylvania treasurer R. Budd Dwyer, convicted of defrauding the state, proclaimed his innocence at a news conference before pulling out a gun, placing the barrel in his mouth and shooting himself to death in front of horrified onlookers.

1995: Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy died at the Kennedy

compound at Hyannis Port, Mass., at age 104. 1997: The Senate confirmed Madeleine Albright as

the nation’s first female secretary of state. 1998: Theodore Kaczynski pleaded guilty in Sacramento to being the Unabomber responsible for three deaths and 29 injuries in return for a sentence of life in prison without parole.

2006: Kobe Bryant scored 81 points, the second-highest in NBA history, in the Los Angeles Lakers’ 122-104 victory over the Toronto Raptors. 2007: A double car bombing of a predominantly Shiite commercial area in Baghdad killed 88 people. Iran announced it had barred 38 nuclear inspectors on a United Nations list from entering the country in apparent retaliation for U.N. sanctions imposed the previous month.

2009: President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp within a year. (The facility remained in operation as lawmakers blocked efforts to transfer terror suspects to the United States; President Donald Trump later issued an order to keep the jail open and allow the Pentagon to bring new prisoners there.)