TODAY IN HISTORY
1820: U.S. naval hero Stephen Decatur was killed in a duel with Commodore James Barron near Washington, D.C.
1882: President Chester Alan Arthur signed a mea
sure outlawing polygamy.
1894: Hockey’s first Stanley Cup championship game was played; home team Montreal defeated Ottawa, 3-1.
1941: The Grand Coulee hydroelectric dam in
Washington state officially went into operation. 1945: The Arab League was formed with the adop
tion of a charter in Cairo, Egypt.
1976: Principal photography for the first “Star Wars”
movie, directed by George Lucas, began in Tunisia. 1987: A garbage barge, carrying 3,200 tons of refuse, left Islip, New York, on a six-month journey in search of a place to unload. (The barge was turned away by several states and three other countries until space was found back in Islip.) 1988: Both houses of Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act.
1991: High school instructor Pamela Smart, accused of recruiting her teenage lover and his friends to kill her husband, Gregory, was convicted in Exeter, New Hampshire, of murder-conspiracy and being an accomplice to murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. 1993: Intel Corp. unveiled the original Pentium
computer chip.
1997: Tara Lipinski, at age 14 years and 10 months, became the youngest ladies’ world figure skating champion in Lausanne, Switzerland.
2010: Google Inc. stopped censoring the internet for China by shifting its search engine off the mainland to Hong Kong.
2011: Yemen’s U.S.-backed president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, his support crumbling among political allies and the army, warned that the country could slide into civil war as the opposition rejected his offer to step down by the end of the year.
2019: Special counsel Robert Mueller closed his Russia investigation with no new charges, delivering his final report to Justice Department officials. Former President Jimmy Carter became the longest-living chief executive in American history; at 94 years and 172 days, he exceeded the lifespan of the late former President George H.W. Bush.