Today in History
Today’s highlight:
On Feb. 16, 2001, the United States and Britain staged air strikes against radar stations and air defense command centers in Iraq.
On this date:
1862: The Civil War Battle of Fort Donelson in Tennessee ended as some 12,000 Confederate soldiers surrendered; Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s victory earned him the moniker “Unconditional Surrender Grant.”
1945: American troops landed on the island of Corregidor in the Philippines during World War II.
1959: Fidel Castro became premier of Cuba a month and a-half after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista.
1961: The United States launched the Explorer 9 satellite.
1968: The nation’s first 911 emergency telephone system was inaugurated in Haleyville, Alabama, as the speaker of the
Alabama House, Rankin Fite, placed a call from the mayor’s office in City Hall to a red telephone at the police station that was answered by U.S. Rep. Tom Bevill.
1988: Seven people were shot to death during an office rampage in Sunnyvale, California, by a man obsessed with a co-worker who was wounded in the attack. The gunman is on death row.
1996: Eleven people were killed in a fiery collision between an Amtrak passenger train and a Maryland commuter train in Silver Spring, Maryland.
1998: A China Airlines Airbus A300 trying to land in fog near Taipei, Taiwan, crashed, killing all 196 people on board, plus seven on the ground.
2002: Authorities in Noble, Georgia, arrested Ray Brent Marsh, who’d been operating a crematory where hundreds of decomposing corpses were found stacked in storage sheds and scattered in the woods behind it. Marsh later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
2005: The NHL canceled what was left of its decimated schedule after a round of last-gasp negotiations failed to resolve differences over a salary cap — the flash-point issue that had led to a lockout.
2006: The U.S. Army said goodbye to its last Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, handing over equipment from the MASH unit to doctors and nurses in Pakistan, the scene of an October 2005 earthquake.
Ten years ago: President Barack Obama announced more than $8 billion in new federal loan guarantees to build two nuclear reactors in Georgia.
Five years ago: Egyptian warplanes struck Islamic State targets in Libya, hours after the extremist group released a grisly video showing the beheading of Egyptian Coptic Christians it had held hostage for weeks.
One year ago: The Vatican announced that former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who served as archbishop of Washington, D.C., had been found guilty by the Vatican of sex abuse and had been defrocked; McCarrick was the highest-ranking churchman and the first cardinal to face that punishment as the church dealt with clerical sex abuse.