HIGHLIGHTS IN HISTORY
Today’s highlight:
On Feb. 14, 2018, a gunman identified as a former student opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, killing 17 people in the nation’s deadliest school shooting since the attack in Newtown, Connecticut, more than five years earlier.
On this date:
1903: The Department of Commerce and Labor was established. It was divided into separate departments of Commerce and Labor in 1913.
1913: Labor leader Jimmy Hoffa was born in Brazil, Ind.; college football coach Woody Hayes was born in Clifton, Ohio; sports broadcaster Mel Allen was born in Birmingham, Ala.
1929: The “St. Valentine’s
Day Massacre” took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone’s gang were gunned down.
1876: Inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied separately for patents related to the telephone. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled Bell the rightful inventor.
1979: Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, was kidnapped in Kabul by Muslim extremists and killed in a shootout between his abductors and police.
1984: Six-year-old Stormie Jones became the world’s first heart-liver transplant recipient at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. (She lived until November 1990.)
2013: Double-amputee and Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, at his home in Pretoria, South Africa; he was later convicted of murder and is serving a 13-year prison term. American Airlines and US Airways announced an $11 billion merger that turned American into the world’s biggest airline.
2017: A former store clerk was convicted in New York of murder in one of the nation’s most haunting missing-child cases, nearly 38 years after 6-year-old Etan Patz disappeared while on the way to a school bus stop.
Ten years ago: Savoring his first big victory in Congress, President Barack Obama used his weekly radio and Internet address to celebrate the just-passed $787 billion economic stimulus bill as a “major milestone on our road to recovery.” Jazz drummer Louie Bellson, who’d performed with Duke
Ellington and Bellson’s late wife, Pearl Bailey, died in Los Angeles at age 84.
Five years ago: Drawing a link between climate change and California’s drought, President Barack Obama said the U.S. had to stop thinking of water as a “zero-sum” game and needed to do a better job of figuring out how to make sure everyone’s water needs were satisfied. Jim Fregosi, a former All-Star who’d won more than 1,000 games as a manager for four teams, died in Miami at age 71.
One year ago: Stormy Daniels’ manager said the porn star now believed she was free to discuss what she said was a sexual encounter with Donald Trump; she believed that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had invalidated a non-disclosure agreement. After initially appearing to cast doubt on allegations that former aide Rob Porter had abused two ex-wives, Trump declared that he was “totally opposed to domestic violence.”