This day in history
Today is Friday, Oct. 6, the 279th day of 2023. There are 86 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Broadcaster and writer Melvyn Bragg is 84. The former leader of Sinn Fein (shin fayn), Gerry Adams, is 75. Rock singer Kevin Cronin (REO Speedwagon) is 72. Actor Elisabeth Shue is 60. Singer Matthew Sweet is 59. Actor Jacqueline Obradors is 57. Actor Amy Jo Johnson is 53. Actor Emily Mortimer is 52. Actor Lamman Rucker is 52. Actor Brett Gelman is 47. Actor Karimah Westbrook is 45. Actor Stefanie Martini is 33.
►In 1536, English theologian and scholar William Tyndale, who was the first to translate the Bible into Early Modern English, was executed for heresy.
►In 1927, the era of talking pictures arrived with the opening of “The Jazz Singer” starring Al Jolson, a feature containing both silent and sound-synchronized sequences.
►In 1939, in a speech to the Reichstag, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler spoke of his plans to reorder the ethnic layout of Europe — a plan that would entail settling the “Jewish problem.”
►In 1973, war erupted in the Middle East as Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel during the Yom Kippur holiday, starting a nearly three-week conflict that would become known as the Yom Kippur War.
►In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford, in his second presidential debate with Democrat Jimmy Carter, asserted that there was “no Soviet domination of eastern Europe.”
►In 1979, Pope John Paul II, on a week-long US tour, became the first pontiff to visit the White House, where he was received by President Jimmy Carter.
►In 1981, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was shot to death by extremists while reviewing a military parade.
►In 2003, American Paul Lauterbur and Briton Peter Mansfield won the Nobel Prize for medicine for work that led to magnetic resonance imaging.
►In 2014, the Supreme Court unexpectedly cleared the way for a dramatic expansion of gay marriage in the United States as it rejected appeals from five states seeking to preserve their bans, effectively making such marriages legal in 30 states.
►In 2018, in the narrowest Senate confirmation of a Supreme Court justice in nearly a century and a half, Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by a 5048 vote; he was sworn in hours later.
►In 2020, President Donald Trump, recovering from COVID19, tweeted his eagerness to return to the campaign trail and said he still planned to attend an upcoming debate with Democrat Joe Biden in Miami; Biden said there should be no debate as long as Trump remained COVID positive. (The debate would be canceled.)
►Last year, a former police officer facing a drug charge burst into a daycare center in Thailand, killing at 36 people, most of them preschoolers, in the deadliest rampage in the nation’s history.