Today In History...
On Nov. 27, 1978, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone (mah-skoh’-nee) and City Supervisor Harvey Milk, a gay-rights activist, were shot to death inside City Hall by former supervisor Dan White. (White served five years for manslaughter; he took his own life in October 1985.)
On this date:
In 1901, the U.S. Army War College was established in Washington, D.C.
In 1924, Macy’s first Thanksgiving Day parade — billed as a “Christmas Parade” — took place in New York.
In 1942, during World War II, the Vichy French navy scuttled its ships and submarines in Toulon (TOO-LOHN’) to keep them out of the hands of German troops.
In 1962, the first Boeing 727 was rolled out at the company’s Renton Plant near Seattle.
In 1970, Pope Paul VI, visiting the Philippines, was slightly wounded at the Manila airport by a dagger-wielding Bolivian painter disguised as a priest.
In 1973, the Senate voted 92-3 to confirm Gerald R. Ford as vice president, succeeding Spiro T. Agnew, who’d resigned.
In 1998, answering 81 questions put to him three weeks earlier, President Bill Clinton wrote the House Judiciary Committee that his testimony in the Monica Lewinsky affair was “not false and misleading.”
In 2000, a day after George W. Bush was certified the winner of Florida’s presidential vote, Al Gore laid out his case for letting the courts settle the nation’s long-count election.
In 2003, President George W. Bush flew to Iraq under extraordinary secrecy and security to spend Thanksgiving with U.S. troops and thank them for “defending the American people from danger.”
In 2008, Iraq’s parliament approved a pact requiring all U.S. troops to be out of the country by Jan. 1, 2012.
In 2015, a gunman attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing three people and injuring nine. (The prosecution of suspect Robert Dear stalled in state court, and then federal court, after he was repeatedly found mentally incompetent to stand trial.)
In 2020, President Donald Trump’s legal team suffered another defeat as a federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected the campaign’s latest effort to challenge Pennsylvania’s election results; Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, wrote that “calling an election unfair does not make it so.” Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian scientist who founded that country’s military nuclear program in the early 2000s, was killed in an attack on the outskirts of Tehran; Iran said Israel was responsible.
Ten years ago: U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice met privately with three Republican senators who had indicated they would block her possible nomination to be U.S. secretary of state; they said afterward that they were even more troubled by her initial explanation of the attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya. (The following month, Rice withdrew from consideration to be secretary of state.)
Five years ago: As he tried to bolster his support in the wake of a sexual harassment allegation, Minnesota Democratic Sen. Al Franken apologized to “everyone who has counted on me to be a champion for women.” Authorities ordered a mass evacuation of people from an expanded danger zone around an erupting volcano on the Indonesian island of Bali; the eruption had closed the island’s international airport, stranding tens of thousands of travelers. On Cyber Monday, the Echo Dot was the top-selling electronic item on Amazon, followed by the Fire TV.
One year ago: The new potentially more contagious omicron variant of the coronavirus popped up in more European countries, just days after being identified in South Africa, leaving governments around the world scrambling to stop the spread. Britain’s health secretary said two people had tested positive in England; both cases were related to travel from southern Africa.
Today’s Birthdays: Footwear designer Manolo Blahnik is 80. Academy Award-winning director Kathryn Bigelow is 71. TV host Bill Nye (“Bill Nye, the Science Guy”) is 67. Actor William Fichtner (Fihk’-nuhr) is 66. Caroline Kennedy is 65. Academy Award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri is
65. Rock musician Charlie Burchill (Simple Minds) is 63. Actor Michael Rispoli is 62. Jazz composer/big band leader Maria Schneider is 62. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is 62. Rock musician Charlie Benante (Anthrax) is 60. Rock musician Mike Bordin (Faith No More) is 60. Actor Fisher Stevens is 59. Actor Robin Givens is
58. Actor Michael Vartan is 54. Actor Elizabeth Marvel is 53. Rapper Skoob (DAS EFX) is 52. Actor Kirk Acevedo is 51. Rapper Twista is 50. Actor Jaleel White is 46. Actor Arjay Smith is 39. Actor Alison Pill is 37. Actor Lashana Lynch (TV: “Still Star-crossed”) is 35.