Today in history
Today is Wednesday, Sept. 5, the 248th day of 2018. There are 117 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlights in History:
On Sept. 5, 1972, the Palestinian group Black September attacked the Israeli Olympic delegation at the Munich Games; 11 Israelis, five guerrillas and a police officer were killed in the resulting siege.
On this date:
In 1698, Russia’s Peter the Great imposed a tax on beards.
In 1774, the first Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia.
In 1882, the nation’s first Labor Day was celebrated with a parade in New York. (Although Labor Day now takes place on the first Monday of September, this first celebration occurred on a Tuesday.)
In 1939, four days after war had broken out in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a proclamation declaring U.S. neutrality in the conflict.
In 1945, Japanese-American Iva Toguri D’Aquino, suspected of being wartime broadcaster “Tokyo Rose,” was arrested in Yokohama. (D’Aquino was later convicted of treason and served six years in prison; she was pardoned in 1977 by President Gerald R. Ford.)
In 1960, at the Rome Olympics, American boxer Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) defeated Zbigniew Pietrzykowski (zuh-BIG’-neeehf pee-eht-chah-KAHF’skee) of Poland to win the light-heavyweight gold medal; Wilma Rudolph of the United States won the second of her three gold medals with the 200-meter sprint.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed legislation making aircraft hijackings a federal crime.
In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford escaped an attempt on his life by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a disciple of Charles Manson, in Sacramento, California.
In 1986, four hijackers who had seized a Pan Am jumbo jet on the ground in Karachi, Pakistan, opened fire when the lights inside the plane failed; a total of 20 people were killed before Pakistani commandos stormed the jetliner.
In 1997, breaking the royal reticence over the death of Princess Diana, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II delivered a televised address in which she called her former daughter-inlaw “a remarkable person.” Mother Teresa died in Calcutta, India, at age 87; conductor Sir Georg Solti (johrj SHOL’-tee) died in France at age 84.
In 2002, Afghan President Hamid Karzai (HAH’mihd KAHR’-zy) survived an assassination attempt in Kandahar, hours after an explosives-packed car tore through a Kabul market.
In 2005, President George W. Bush nominated John Roberts to succeed the late William Rehnquist as chief justice of the United States. An Indonesian jetliner crashed, killing 149 people, including 49 on the ground; 17 passengers survived.
Ten years ago: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice became the highest-ranking American official in half a century to visit Libya, where she met Moammar Gadhafi. Europe’s Rosetta space probe flew by the Steins asteroid 250 million miles from Earth. Publishing giant Robert Giroux, who’d guided and supported dozens of great writers from T.S. Eliot and Jack Kerouac to Bernard Malamud and Susan Sontag, died in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, at age 94.
Five years ago: President Barack Obama, in St. Petersburg for a G-20 summit, pressed fellow world leaders to support a U.S. strike on Syria; however, he encountered opposition from Russia, China and even the European Union, who said it was too soon for military action.