Today in history
Today is Tuesday, June 12, the 163rd day of 2018. There are 202 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On June 12, 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2001.) On this date:
In 1550, the city of Helsinki was established through a decree by King Gustavus I Vasa of Sweden.
In 1665, England installed a municipal government in New York, formerly the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, and appointed its first mayor, Thomas Willett.
In 1776, Virginia’s colonial legislature adopted a Declaration of Rights.
In 1898, Philippine nationalists declared independence from Spain.
In 1939, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was dedicated in Cooperstown, New York.
In 1942, Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday, less than a month before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis.
In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages.
In 1968, the Roman Polanski horror film “Rosemary’s Baby,” starring Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, was released by Paramount Pictures.
In 1978, David Berkowitz was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for each of the six “Son of Sam” .44-caliber killings that terrified New Yorkers.
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
In 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were slashed to death outside her Los Angeles home. (O.J. Simpson was later acquitted of the killings in a criminal trial, but was eventually held liable in a civil action.) Boeing’s new 777 jetliner went on its first test flight.
In 2016, an Americanborn Muslim opened fire at the Pulse nightclub, a gay establishment in Orlando, Florida, leaving 49 people dead and 53 wounded before being shot dead by police.
Ten years ago: In a stinging rebuke to President George W. Bush’s anti-terror policies, a deeply divided Supreme Court ruled that foreign detainees held for years at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba had the right to appeal to U.S. civilian courts to challenge their indefinite imprisonment without charges. Three heavily armed robbers stole two Pablo Picasso prints, “The Painter and the Model” and “Minotaur, Drinker and Women,” plus two paintings by other artists from a museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (The works were later recovered.) Taiwan and China agreed to set up permanent offices in each other’s territory for the first time in nearly six decades.
Five years ago: The director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Keith Alexander, vigorously defended once-secret surveillance programs before the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying that collecting Americans’ phone records and tapping into their Internet activity had disrupted dozens of terrorist attacks. Ariel Castro, 52, accused of holding three women captive in his Cleveland home for about a decade, pleaded not guilty to hundreds of rape and kidnapping charges. (Castro was later sentenced to life plus 1,000 years and soon after committed suicide in prison.) NASCAR driver Jason Leffler, 37, died after an accident during a dirt car event at Bridgeport Speedway in New Jersey.