TODAY IN HISTORY
1950: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Henderson v. United States, struck down racially segregated railroad dining cars.
1967: War erupted in the Middle East as Israel, anticipating a possible attack by its Arab neighbors, launched a series of preemptive airfield strikes that destroyed nearly the entire Egyptian air force; Syria, Jordan and Iraq immediately entered the conflict.
1968: Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot and mortally wounded after claiming victory in California’s Democratic presidential primary at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles; assassin Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was arrested at the scene.
1975: Egypt reopened the Suez Canal to international shipping, eight years after it was closed because of the 1967 war with Israel.
1976: Fourteen people were killed when the Teton Dam in Idaho burst.
1981: The Centers for Disease Control reported that five homosexual people in Los Angeles had come down with a rare kind of pneumonia; they were the first recognized cases of what later became known as AIDS.
2002: Elizabeth Smart, 14, was abducted from her Salt Lake City home. (Smart was found alive by police in a Salt Lake suburb in March 2003. One kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, is serving a prison sentence; the other, Wanda Barzee, was released in September 2018.)
2004: Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, died in Los Angeles at age 93 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.
2006: More than 50 National Guardsmen from Utah became the first unit to work along the U.S.-Mexico border as part of President George W. Bush’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
2013: U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians, many of them sleeping women and children, pleaded guilty to murder at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, to avoid the death penalty; he was sentenced to life in prison.
2020: Minneapolis banned chokeholds by police, the first of many changes in police practices to be announced in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death; officers would also now be required to intervene any time they saw unauthorized force by another officer.