On this date
In 1917,
the U.S. Congress passed, over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, an act severely curtailing Asian immigration.
In 1937,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed increasing the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices; the proposal drew accusations that Roosevelt was attempting to “pack” the court.
In 1971,
Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell walked on the moon.
In 1983,
former Gestapo official Klaus Barbie was brought to Lyon, France, to stand trial. (He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 1991.)
In 1994,
white separatist Byron De La Beckwith was convicted in Jackson, Mississippi, of murdering civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963, and was sentenced to life in prison. (Beckwith died in 2001 at age 80.)
In 2001,
four disciples of Osama bin Laden went on trial in New York in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. (The four were convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.)
In 2002,
a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., indicted John Walker Lindh on 10 charges, alleging he was trained by Osama bin Laden’s network and then conspired with the Taliban to kill Americans. (Lindh later pleaded guilty to lesser offenses and was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. He was released in May 2019.)
Ten years ago:
Toyota president Akio Toyoda apologized amid criticism that the automaker had mishandled a crisis over sticking gas pedals.
Five years ago:
RadioShack filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and said it would sell up to 2,400 stores.
One year ago:
In his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump called on Washington to cast aside “revenge, resistance and retribution,” but refused to yield on the hard-line immigration policies that had infuriated Democrats and forced a government shutdown.