TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Sunday, Feb. 5, the 36th day of 2023. There are 335 days left in the year.

On this date in:

1811: George, the Prince of Wales, was named Prince Regent due to the mental illness of his father, Britain’s King George III.

1917: The U.S. Congress passed, over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, an act severely curtailing Asian immigration.

1918: During World War I, the Cunard liner SS Tuscania, which was transporting about 2,000 American troops to Europe, was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the Irish Sea with the loss of more than 200 people.

1922: The first edition of Reader’s Digest was published.

1937: President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed increasing the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices; the proposal, which failed in Congress, drew accusations that Roosevelt was attempting to “pack” the nation’s highest court.

1971: Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell stepped onto the surface of the moon in the first of two lunar excursions.

1973: Services were held at Arlington National Cemetery for U.S. Army Col. William B. Nolde, the last official American combat casualty before the Vietnam cease-fire took effect.

1983: Former Nazi Gestapo official Klaus Barbie, expelled from Bolivia, was brought to Lyon, France, to stand trial. (He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison – he died in 1991.)

1993: President Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, granting workers up to 12 weeks unpaid leave for family emergencies.

1994: White separatist Byron De La Beckwith was convicted in Jackson, Mississippi, of murdering civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963, and was immediately sentenced to life in prison. (Beckwith died Jan. 21, 2001 at age 80.)

2008: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru to the Beatles who introduced the West to transcendental meditation, died at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop; he was believed to be about 90.

2014: CVS Caremark announced it would pull cigarettes and other tobacco products from its stores.