Today in history
Today is Monday, Dec. 28, the 363rd day of 2020. There are three days left in the year. Today’s Highlight in History: On Dec. 28, 1612, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei observed the planet Neptune, but mistook it for a star. (Neptune wasn’t officially discovered until 1846 by Johann Gottfried Galle.)
On this date:
• In 1832, John C. Calhoun became the first vice president of the United States to resign, stepping down because of differences with President Andrew Jackson.
• In 1908, a major earthquake followed by a tsunami devastated the Italian city of Messina, killing at least 70,000 people.
• In 1912, San Francisco’s Municipal Railway began operations with Mayor James Rolph Jr. at the controls of Streetcar No. 1 as
50,000 spectators looked on.
• In 1945, Congress officially recognized the Pledge of Allegiance.
• In 1972, Kim Il Sung, the premier of North Korea, was named the country’s president under a new constitution.
• In 1973, the Endangered Species Act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon.
• In 1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, the first American “testtube” baby, was born in Norfolk, Virginia.
• In 1987, the bodies of 14 relatives of Ronald Gene Simmons were found at his home near Dover, Arkansas, after Simmons shot and killed two other people in Russellville. (Simmons, who never explained his motives, was executed in 1990.)
• In 2001, the National Guard was called out to help Buffalo, New York, dig out from a paralyzing, 5-day storm that had unloaded nearly 7 feet of snow.
• In 2007, Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was laid to rest as the country’s army tried to quell a frenzy of rioting in the wake of her assassination.
• In 2014, the war in Afghanistan, fought for 13 bloody years and still raging, came to a formal end with a quiet flag-lowering ceremony in Kabul that marked the transition of the fighting from U.S.-led combat troops to the country’s own security forces.
• In 2016, Actor Debbie Reynolds, who lit up the screen in “Singin’ in the Rain” and other Hollywood classics, died at age
84 a day after losing her daughter, Carrie Fisher, who was 60.
Ten years ago: Eight young people were killed in a fire that swept through an abandoned New Orleans warehouse (some of the victims were squatters who had been living inside the building). Agathe von Trapp, the real-life inspiration for eldest daughter Liesl in the musical “The Sound of Music,” died in Towson, Maryland, at age 97.
Five years ago: A grand jury in Cleveland declined to indict a white rookie police officer in the killing of 12-year-old Tamir
Rice, a Black youngster who was shot while playing with what turned out to be a pellet gun. Iraqi forces backed by U.S.-led airstrikes drove Islamic State militants out of the center of Ramadi and seized the main government complex there. Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister, 70, the singer and bassist who founded Motorhead in 1975, died in Los Angeles.
One year ago: A man armed with a machete stabbed five people at a Hanukkah celebration in a rabbi’s home in suburban New York; the most critically injured victim, 72-year-old Josef Neumann, died three months after the attack. (Grafton Thomas has pleaded not guilty; the charges include federal hate crimes.) A truck bomb attack at a busy checkpoint in the Somali capital of Mogadishu left 79 people dead; Somalia’s al-Shabab Islamic extremist rebels claimed responsibility. Five people were killed in the crash of a small plane in Lafayette, Louisiana, as they headed to the Peach Bowl in Atlanta to see LSU play Oklahoma. Tennis star Serena Williams was voted the AP’s Female Athlete of the Decade. U.S. astronaut Christina Koch set a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, breaking the old mark of 288 days.