This day in history
Today is Tuesday, Oct. 3, the 276th day of 2023. There are 89 days left in the year.
▶ Birthdays: Composer Steve Reich is 87. Rock ’n’ roll star Chubby Checker is 82. Actor Alan Rachins is 81. Singer Lindsey Buckingham is 74. Former astronaut Kathryn Sullivan is 72. Baseball Hall of Famer Dave Winfield is 72. Baseball Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley is 69. Rock musician Tommy Lee is 61. Singer Gwen Stefani is 54. Rapper Talib Kweli is 48. Actor Tessa Thompson is 40. Actor Alicia Vikander is 35.
▶ In 1941, Adolf Hitler declared in a speech in Berlin that Russia had been “broken” and would “never rise again.”
▶ In 1944, during World War II, US Army troops cracked the Siegfried Line north of Aachen, Germany.
▶ In 1951, the New York Giants captured the National League pennant by a score of 5-4 as Bobby Thomson hit a threerun homer off Ralph Branca of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the “shot heard ’round the world.”
▶ In 1961, “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” starring Mary Tyler Moore, made its debut on CBS.
▶ In 1970, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration was established under the Department of Commerce.
▶ In 1974, Frank Robinson was named major league baseball’s first Black manager as he hired by the Cleveland Indians.
▶ In 1981, Irish nationalists at the Maze Prison near Belfast ended seven months of hunger strikes that had claimed 10 lives.
▶ In 1990, West Germany and East Germany ended 45 years of postwar division, declaring the creation of a reunified country.
▶ In 1995, the jury in the O.J. Simpson murder trial in Los Angeles found the former football star not guilty of the 1994 slayings of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman.
▶ In 2001, the Senate approved an agreement normalizing trade between the United States and Vietnam.
▶ In 2003, a tiger attacked magician Roy Horn of duo “Siegfried Roy” during a performance in Las Vegas, leaving the superstar illusionist in critical condition on his 59th birthday.
▶ In 2008, O.J. Simpson was found guilty of robbing two sports-memorabilia dealers at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel room. (Simpson was later sentenced to nine to 33 years in prison; he was granted parole in July 2017 and released from prison in October of that year.)
▶ In 2011, an Italian appeals court freed Amanda Knox of Seattle after four years in prison, tossing murder convictions against Knox and an ex-boyfriend in the stabbing of their British roommate, Meredith Kercher.
▶ In 2013, a smugglers’ ship packed with African migrants sank off the coast of a southern Italian island, killing more than 365 people.
▶ In 2017, Yahoo announced that the largest data breach in history had affected all 3 billion accounts on its service, not the 1 billion it had revealed earlier.