This day in history
Today is Monday, June 5, the 156th day of 2023. There are 209 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Actor-singer Bill Hayes is 98. Broadcast journalist Bill Moyers is 89. Former Canadian prime minister Joe Clark is 84. Author Dame Author Margaret Drabble is 84. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is 82. Country singer Don Reid (The Statler Brothers) is 78. Rock musician Freddie Stone (Sly and the Family Stone) is 76. Rock singer Laurie Anderson is 76. Country singer Gail Davies is 75. Author Ken Follett is 74. Financial guru Suze Orman is 72. Jazz keyboardist Peter Erskine is 69. Jazz saxophonist Kenny G is 67. Psychedelic Furs singer Richard Butler is 67. Actor Beth Hall is 65. Actor Jeff Garlin is 61. Actor Karen Sillas is 60. Actor Ron Livingston is 56. Singer Brian McKnight is 54. Actor Mark Wahlberg is 52. Actor Liza Weil is 46. Actor Amanda Crew is 37. Musician-producer DJ Mustard is 33.
▶ In 1944, Harvard Medical School opens admissions to women.
▶ In 1950, the US Supreme Court, in Henderson v. United States, struck down racially segregated railroad dining cars.
▶ In 1967, war erupted in the Middle East. Israel, anticipating a possible attack by its Arab neighbors, launched a series of airfield strikes that destroyed nearly the entire Egyptian air force; Syria, Jordan, and Iraq immediately entered the conflict.
▶ In 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot and mortally wounded after claiming victory in California’s Democratic presidential primary at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles; assassin Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was arrested at the scene.
▶ In 1975, Egypt reopened the Suez Canal to international shipping, eight years after it was closed because of the 1967 war with Israel.
▶ In 1976, 14 people were killed when the Teton Dam in Idaho burst.
▶ In 1981, the Centers for Disease Control reported that five men in Los Angeles had come down with a rare kind of pneumonia; they were the first recognized cases of what later became known as AIDS.
▶ In 2002, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her Salt Lake City home. (Smart was found alive by police in a Salt Lake suburb in March 2003. One kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, was sentenced to life without parole; the other, Wanda Barzee, was released in September 2018.)
▶ In 2004, Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th president, died in Los Angeles at age 93 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.
▶ In 2013, British newspaper The Guardian reported the National Security Agency was collecting the telephone records of millions of American customers of Verizon under a top secret court order. Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians, many of them sleeping women and children, pleaded guilty to murder at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash., to avoid the death penalty.
▶ In 2018, after it became clear that most players from the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles weren’t going to show up, President Trump gave the boot to a White House ceremony for the team, and instead threw his own brief “Celebration of America.” Former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein pleaded not guilty in New York to rape and criminal sex act charges; he’d been indicted a week earlier on charges involving two women.
▶ In 2020, Minneapolis banned chokeholds by police, the first of many changes in law enforcement practices to be announced in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death; officers would also now be required to intervene any time they saw unauthorized force by another officer.
▶ Last year, Queen Elizabeth II appeared at the balcony of Buckingham Palace, delighting fans who had hoped to catch a glimpse of her during the final day of festivities marking the monarch’s 70 years on the throne. (The queen died three months later.)