This day in history
Today is Monday, May 29, the 149th day of 2023. There are 216 days left in the year. This is Memorial Day.
Birthdays: Former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent is 85. Actor Anthony Geary is 76. Actor Cotter Smith is 74. Singer Rebbie Jackson is 73. Movie composer Danny Elfman is 70. Singer LaToya Jackson is 67. Actor Ted Levine is 66. Actor Annette Bening is 65. Actor Rupert Everett is 64. Actor Adrian Paul is 64. Singer Melissa Etheridge is
62. Actor Lisa Whelchel is 60. Actor Tracey Bregman is 60. Rock musician Noel Gallagher is
56. Actor Anthony Azizi is 54. Rock musician Chan Kinchla (Blues Traveler) is 54. Actor Laverne Cox is 51. Cartoonist Aaron McGruder (“The Boondocks”) is 49. Singer Melanie Brown (Spice Girls) is 48. Latin singer Fonseca is 44. Actor Riley Keough is 34.
►In 1765, Patrick Henry denounced the Stamp Act before Virginia’s House of Burgesses.
►In 1790, Rhode Island became the 13th original colony to ratify the US Constitution.
►In 1848, Wisconsin became the 30th state of the union.
►In 1914, the Canadian ocean liner RMS Empress of Ireland sank in the St. Lawrence River in eastern Quebec after colliding with the Norwegian cargo ship SS Storstad; of the 1,477 people on board the Empress of Ireland, 1,012 died. (The Storstad sustained only minor damage.)
►In 1953, Mount Everest was conquered as Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tensing Norgay of Nepal became the first climbers to reach the summit.
►In 1977, Janet Guthrie became the first woman to race in the Indianapolis 500, finishing in 29th place (the winner was A.J. Foyt).
►In 1985, 39 people were killed at the European Cup Final in Brussels, Belgium, when rioting broke out and a wall separating British and Italian soccer fans collapsed.
►In 1988, President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev opened their historic summit in Moscow.
►In 2009, a judge in Los Angeles sentenced music producer Phil Spector to 19 years to life in prison for the murder of actor Lana Clarkson. (Spector remained in prison until his death in January 2021.)
►In 2013, a US drone strike killed Waliur Rehman, the No. 2 commander of the Pakistani Taliban. Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, a conservative firebrand and a favorite of tea party Republicans, said she would not run for another term in the U.S. House. The Rev. Andrew Greeley, 85, an outspoken Roman Catholic priest, best-selling author and longtime newspaper columnist, died in Chicago.In 2014, Starbucks closed thousands of stores for part of the day to hold training sessions for employees on unconscious bias, in response to the arrests of two Black men in Philadelphia at one of its stores.
►In 2015, the Obama administration formally removed Cuba from the U.S. terrorism blacklist.
►In 2018, ABC canceled the reboot of “Roseanne,” after star Roseanne Barr’s tweet that referred to former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett as a product of the Muslim Brotherhood and the “Planet of the Apes.”
►In 2019, in his first public remarks on the Russia investigation, special counsel Robert Mueller said charging President Trump with a crime was “not an option” because of federal rules, but he emphasized that the investigation did not exonerate the president.
►In 2020, fired Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was arrested and charged with thirddegree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd. (He would be convicted in April 2021 on those charges as well as second-degree unintentional murder.) Thousands of protesters in Minneapolis angered by Floyd’s death ignored a curfew as unrest again overwhelmed authorities; fires burned unchecked in cars and businesses.
►Last year, President Biden sought to comfort a city grieving the killings of 19 elementary school pupils and two teachers at the hands of a lone gunman in Uvalde, Texas. Faced with chants of “do something” as he departed a church service to meet privately with the families, Biden responded: “We will.” The Justice Department said it would review the law enforcement response to the shooting. Thousands of Israeli nationalists, some of them chanting “Death to Arabs,” paraded through the heart of the main Palestinian thoroughfare in Jerusalem’s Old City, in a show of force that risked setting off a new wave of violence in the tense city. Ronnie Hawkins, a brash rockabilly star from Arkansas who became a patron of the Canadian music scene after moving north and recruiting a handful of local musicians later known as the Band, died at age 87.