TODAY IN HISTORY
1945: Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were executed by Italian partisans as they attempted to flee the country.
1952: War with Japan officially ended as a treaty signed in San Francisco the year before took effect.
1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered U.S. Marines to the Dominican Republic to protect American citizens and interests in the face of a civil war.
1967: Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title after he refused to be inducted into the armed forces.
1980: President Jimmy Carter accepted the resignation of Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, who had opposed the failed rescue mission aimed at freeing American hostages in Iran.
1986: The Soviet Union informed the world of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl that began two days earlier.
1994: Former CIA official Aldrich Ames, who had passed U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union and then Russia, pleaded guilty to espionage and tax evasion, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
2001: A Russian rocket lifted off from Central Asia bearing the first space tourist, California businessman Dennis Tito, and two cosmonauts on a journey to the International Space Station.
2011: Convicted sex offender Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, pleaded guilty to kidnapping and raping a California girl, Jaycee Dugard, who was abducted in 1991 at the age of 11 and rescued 18 years later. (Phillip Garrido was sentenced to 431 years to life in prison; Nancy Garrido was sentenced to 36 years to life in prison.)
2015: Urging Americans to “do some soul-searching,” President Barack Obama expressed deep frustration over recurring Black deaths at the hands of police, rioters who responded with senseless violence and a society that would only “feign concern” without addressing the root causes.
2018: Alfie Evans, the 23-month-old terminally ill British toddler who was at the center of a legal battle over his treatment, died at a British hospital.
2021: Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, who orbited the moon alone while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their first steps on the lunar surface, died of cancer in Florida at age 90.