Today in history
On Oct. 5, 2005, defying the White House, senators voted 90-9 to approve an amendment sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would prohibit the use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” against anyone in U. S. government custody. (A reluctant President George W. Bush later signed off on the amendment.)
In 1892, the Dalton Gang, notorious for its train robberies, was practically wiped out while attempting to rob a pair of banks in Coffeyville, Kansas.
In 1947, President Harry S. Truman delivered the first televised White House address as he spoke on the world food crisis.
In 1953, Earl Warren was sworn in as the 14th chief justice of the United States, succeeding Fred M. Vinson.
In 1955, a stage adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett opened at the Cort Theatre in New York.
In 1958, racially-desegregated Clinton High School in Clinton, Tennessee, was mostly leveled by an early morning bombing.
In 1983, Solidarity founder Lech Walesa ( lek vah-WEN’sah) was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1988, Democrat Lloyd Bentsen lambasted Republican Dan Quayle during their vice-presidential debate, telling Quayle, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
In 1989, a jury in Charlotte, North Carolina, convicted former P-T-L evangelist Jim Bakker (BAY’-kur) of using his television show to defraud followers.
In 2001, tabloid photo editor Robert Stevens died from inhaled anthrax, the first of a series of anthrax cases in Florida, New York, New Jersey and Washington.
In 2011, Apple founder Steve Jobs, 56, died in Palo Alto, California.
In 2017, Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein announced that he was taking a leave of absence from his company after a New York Times article detailed decades of alleged sexual harassment against women including actor Ashley Judd.
In 2018, a jury in Chicago convicted white police officer Jason Van Dyke of second-degree murder in the 2014 shooting of Black teenager Laquan McDonald.
Ten years ago: Faisal Shahzad (FY’-sul shah-ZAHD’), the Pakistani immigrant who’d tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, accepted a life sentence from a federal judge in New York with a smirk and warned that Americans could expect more bloodshed at the hands of Muslims. President Barack Obama convened the first-ever White House summit on community colleges, calling them the “unsung heroes of America’s education system.”
Five years ago: The United States, Japan and 10 other nations in Asia and the Americas reached agreement on the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. The Coast Guard concluded that El Faro, a container ship that went missing during Hurricane Joaquin off the Bahamas, had sunk. Irishborn William Campbell, Satoshi Omura and of Japan and Tu Youyou of China won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries that helped doctors fight malaria and infections caused by roundworm parasites.
One year ago: A Taliban official said a delegation from the group had met with a U.S. envoy in the Pakistani capital; it was the first such encounter since President Donald Trump announced a month earlier that a peace deal to end Afghanistan’s 18- year war was dead. Iraqi protesters pressed on with anti-government rallies in the capital and across several provinces for a fifth day, setting government offices on fire; security agencies fatally shot 19 protesters and wounded more than three dozen.