Today in history

On Feb. 21,

1838, American inventor Samuel Morse gave his first public demonstration of the telegraph.

In 1885 the Washington Monument was dedicated.

In 1916 the World War I Battle of Verdun began in France.

In 1947 Edwin Land publicly demonstrated his Polaroid Land camera, which could produce a black-and-white photograph in 60 seconds.

In 1965 former Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, 39, was shot to death in New York by assassins identified as Black Muslims.

In 1972 President Richard Nixon began his historic visit to China as he and his wife, Pat, arrived in Shanghai. Also in 1972, West Coast longshoremen returned to their jobs after their 134-day strike.

In 1973 Israeli fighter planes shot down a Libyan Airlines jet over the Sinai Desert, killing more than 100 people.

In 1974 hockey player Tim Horton, for whom the Canadian chain of doughnut restaurants Tim Hortons is named, died in a car accident outside St. Catharines, Ontario; he was 44.

In 1975 former Attorney General John Mitchell and former White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were sentenced to 2 1⁄2 to 8 years in prison for their roles in the Watergate cover-up.

In 1980 a general strike began in Kabul, Afghanistan, to protest Soviet military intervention.

In 1986 Larry Wu-tai Chin, the first American found guilty of spying for China, killed himself in his Virginia jail cell.

In 1988 TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart tearfully confessed to his congregation in Baton Rouge, La., that he was guilty of an unspecified sin, and said he was leaving the pulpit temporarily. (Reports linked Swaggart to an admitted prostitute, Debra Murphree.)

In 1995 Chicago investment millionaire Steve Fossett became the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon, landing in Leader, Saskatchewan.

In 1996 the Space Telescope Science Institute announced that photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed the existence of a black hole equal to the mass of 2 billion suns in a galaxy 30 million light years away.

In 2002 the State Department declared that Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was dead, a month after he had been abducted by Islamic extremists in Pakistan.

In 2003 chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix ordered the destruction of dozens of Iraqi missiles with ranges that violated U.N. limits.

In 2005 Israel freed 500 Palestinian prisoners in a goodwill gesture.

In 2006 Harvard University president Lawrence Summers announced his resignation.

In 2013 Drew Peterson, a former Bolingbrook, Ill., police sergeant, was sentenced to 38 years in prison for the murder of his third wife, Kathleen Savio. Also in 2013, a pre-dawn shooting and fiery crash killed aspiring rapper Kenneth Wayne Cherry Jr. and two others along the famed Strip in Las Vegas.