TODAY IN HISTORY
1901: The U.S. Army War College was
established in Washington, D.C. 1924: Macy’s first Thanksgiving Day parade — billed as a “Christmas Parade” — took place in New York. 1942: During World War II, the Vichy French navy scuttled its ships and submarines in Toulon to keep them out of the hands of German troops. 1953: Playwright Eugene O’Neill died
in Boston at age 65.
1962: The first Boeing 727 was rolled out at the company’s Renton Plant near Seattle.
1967: The Beatles album “Magical Mystery Tour” was released in the United States by Capitol Records. 1970: Pope Paul VI, visiting the Philippines, was slightly wounded at the Manila airport by a dagger-wielding Bolivian painter disguised as a priest.
1973: The Senate voted 92-3 to confirm Gerald R. Ford as vice president, succeeding Spiro T. Agnew, who’d resigned.
1978: San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk, a gay rights activist, were shot to death inside City Hall by former Supervisor Dan White. (White served five years for manslaughter; he took his own life in October 1985.)
1998: Answering 81 questions put to him three weeks earlier, President Bill Clinton wrote the House Judiciary Committee that his testimony in the Monica Lewinsky affair was “not false and misleading.”
2000: A day after George W. Bush was certified the winner of Florida’s presidential vote, Al Gore laid out his case for letting the courts settle the nation’s long-count election.
2007: A Somali immigrant (Nuradin Abdi) was sentenced to 10 years in prison for plotting to blow up an Ohio shopping mall.
2011: In an unprecedented move against an Arab nation, the Arab League approved economic sanctions against Syria, to pressure Damascus to end its deadly suppression of an 8-month-old uprising against President Bashar Assad. 2015: A gunman attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colo., killing three people and injuring nine. (Suspect Robert Dear was sent to a psychiatric hospital after being deemed incompetent for trial; he was charged in federal court after his prosecution in state court stalled.)
2016: President-elect Donald Trump claimed that “millions” had voted illegally in the national election, scoffing at Hillary Clinton’s edge of nearly 2 million votes in the popular vote and returning to his campaign mantra of a rigged race even as he prepared to enter the White House in less than two months.
2020: President Donald Trump’s legal team suffered another defeat as a federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected the campaign’s latest effort to challenge Pennsylvania’s election results; Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, wrote that “calling an election unfair does not make it so.” The coronavirus pandemic kept crowds thin at stores across the country on Black Friday, but a surge in online shopping offered a small beacon of hope for struggling retailers. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian scientist who founded that country’s military nuclear program in the early 2000s, was killed in an attack on the outskirts of Tehran; Iran said Israel was responsible. California Gov. Gavin Newson reversed parole for Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten, marking the fourth time a governor had blocked her release.