TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Saturday, Feb. 10, the 41st day of 2024. There are 325 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History: On Feb. 10, 1996,
world chess champion Garry Kasparov lost the first game of a match in Philadelphia against an IBM computer dubbed “Deep Blue.” (Kasparov ended up winning the match, 4 games to 2; he was defeated by Deep Blue in a rematch the following year.)
On this date: In 1763,
Britain, Spain and France signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War in North America). In 1936, Nazi Germany’s Reichstag passed a law investing the Gestapo secret police with absolute authority, exempt from any legal review. In 1962, the Soviet Union exchanged captured American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers for Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy held by the United States. In 1989, Ron Brown was elected the first Black chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In 2005, North Korea boasted publicly for the first time that it possessed nuclear weapons.
In 2020, U.S. health officials confirmed the first case of the novel coronavirus among the hundreds of people who’d been evacuated from China to military bases in the United States; it was among the 13 confirmed cases in the U.S. Britain declared the new coronavirus a “serious and imminent threat to public health” and said people with the virus could now be forcibly quarantined. Today’s birthdays: Actor Robert Wagner is 94. Singer Roberta Flack is 87. Singer Jimmy Merchant (Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers) is 84. Olympic gold-medal swimmer Mark Spitz is 74. Walt Disney Co. executive Robert Iger is 73. World Golf Hall of Famer Greg Norman is 69. Actor Kathleen Beller is 68. Country singer Lionel Cartwright is 64. ABC News correspondent George Stephanopoulos is 63. Political commentator Glenn Beck is 60. Actor Laura Dern is 57. Writerproducer-director Vince Gilligan (TV: “Breaking Bad”) is 57. Country singer Dude Mowrey is 52. Actor Jason Olive is 52. Actor Elizabeth Banks is 50. Actor Julia Pace Mitchell is 46. Actor Uzo Aduba is 43. Actor Barry Sloane is 43. Rock singer Eric Dill is 42. Actor Trevante Rhodes is 34. Actor Emma Roberts is 33. Actor Chloe Grace Moretz is 27.