TODAY IN WORLD HISTORY
Today is Saturday, June 10, the 161st day of 2017. There are 204 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlights in History
On June 10, 1967, war in the Mideast ended as Israel and Syria accepted a United Nations-mediated cease-fire; during the six days of conflict with Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq, Israeli forces captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Academy Award-winning actor Spencer Tracy died in Beverly Hills at age 67.
On this date
• In 1692, the first execution resulting from the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts took place as Bridget Bishop was hanged.
• In 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in Akron, Ohio, by Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith and William Griffith Wilson.
• In 1942, during World War II, German forces massacred 173 male residents of Lidice (LIH’-dyiht-zeh), Czechoslovakia, in retaliation for the killing of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich.
• In 1944, German forces massacred 642 residents of the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane.
• In 1982, Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi fantasy “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” had its world premiere in Los Angeles.
• In 1991, 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard of South Lake Tahoe, was abducted by Phillip and Nancy Garrido; Jaycee was held by the couple for 18 years before she was found by authorities.
• In 2002, organized crime figure John Gotti died at a prison hospital in Springfield, Mo., at age 61. A partial solar eclipse cast a shadow over parts of eastern Asia, the Pacific Ocean and North America.
On June 11
• In 1509, England’s King Henry VIII married his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
• In 1770, Captain James Cook, commander of the British ship Endeavour, “discovered” the Great Barrier Reef off Australia by running onto it.
• In 1919, Sir Barton won the Belmont Stakes, becoming horse racing’s first Triple Crown winner.
• In 1937, eight members of the Soviet Red Army High Command accused of disloyalty were put on trial, convicted and immediately executed as part of Josef Stalin’s Great Purge.
• In 1962, three prisoners at Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay staged an escape, leaving the island on a makeshift raft; they were never found or heard from again.
• Seattle Slew won the Belmont Stakes, capturing the Triple Crown.
• In 1987, Margaret Thatcher became the first British prime minister in 160 years to win a third consecutive term of office as her Conservatives held onto a reduced majority in Parliament.
• In 1993, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people who commit “hate crimes” motivated by bigotry may be sentenced to extra punishment; the court also ruled religious groups had a constitutional right to sacrifice animals in worship services.
• In 2001, Timothy McVeigh, 33, was executed by injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.
On June 12
• In 1898, Philippine nationalists declared independence from Spain.
• In 1939, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was dedicated in Cooperstown, N.Y.
• In 1942, Anne Frank, a Germanborn 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 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Miss. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2001.)
• In 1979, 26-year-old cyclist Bryan Allen flew the human-powered Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel.
• 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.”