TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT 1943

The nearly month-long Warsaw Ghetto Uprising came to an end as German forces crushed the Jewish resistance and blew up the Great Synagogue.

ALSO ON THIS DATE 1770

Marie Antoinette, age 14, married the future King Louis XVI of France, who was 15.

1929

The first Academy Awards were presented. “Wings” won “best production,” while Emil Jannings and Janet Gaynor were named best actor and best actress.

1939

The federal government began its first food stamp program in Rochester, New York.

1957

Federal agent Eliot Ness, who organized “The Untouchables” team that took on gangster Al Capone, died in Coudersport, Pennsylvania, at age 54.

1960

The first working laser was demonstrated at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California, by physicist Theodore Maiman.

1966

China launched the Cultural Revolution, a radical as well as deadly reform movement aimed at purging the country of “counter-revolutionaries.”

1975

Japanese climber Junko Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

1990

Death claimed entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. in Los Angeles at age 64 and “Muppets” creator Jim Henson in New York at age 53.

1997

President Bill Clinton publicly apologized for the notorious Tuskegee experiment, in which government scientists deliberately allowed Black men to weaken and die of treatable syphilis.

2007

Anti-war Democrats in the Senate failed in an attempt to cut off funds for the Iraq war.

2012

Gen. Ratko Mladic went on trial at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in the Netherlands, accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. (Mladic would be convicted on 10 counts and sentenced to life in prison.)

2017

The White House issued a furious denial after a report that President Donald Trump personally appealed to FBI Director James Comey to abandon the bureau’s investigation into National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

2021

Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City flattened three buildings and killed more than 40 people; the attack was the deadliest in the latest round of violence between Israel and Hamas. Hamas launched rockets from civilian areas in Gaza toward civilian areas in Israel; one slammed into a synagogue in the southern city of Ashkelon hours before evening services for the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, but no injuries were reported.