Today in history
1629 - Peace of Susa ends war between England and France.
1775 - The first American society for the abolition of slavery is organized by Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush.
1828 - The first edition of Noah Webster’s ‘‘American Dictionary of the English Language’’ is published.
1834 - Republican uprising in France is crushed by army under Adolphe Thiers.
1865 - U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is shot by actor John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., and dies the following morning.
1890 - Delegates to Washington Conference of American States create what is to become the Panamerican Union; that North, South and Central America are all American nations.
1910 - U.S. President William Howard Taft throws the first ball to start the major league baseball season.
1912 - The British liner Titanic collides with an iceberg in the North Atlantic and begins sinking.
1956 - Ampex Corp. demonstrates its first commercial videotape recorder.
1992 - U.N. warns Iraq it risks military confrontation by moving missiles to Kurdish areas.
1993 - On International Women’s Day, a Chinese newspaper asks 100 women what they would like to be. Sixty say they want to be men.
2004 - CIA Director George Tenet and FBI Director Robert Mueller go before the Sept. 11 commission and say that enormous intelligence and law enforcement gaps that contributed to the attacks are being filled, but that it will take years more for America to build the needed systems to effectively combat terrorists.
2007 - Two brothers strapped with explosives blow themselves up in the middle of a boulevard that runs behind the American Language Center in Casablanca, Morocco, and police arrest another three suspects including one wearing an explosives belt - hours later.
2012 - Egypt’s election commission disqualifies 10 presidential hopefuls, including Hosni Mubarak’s former spy chief and key Islamists, from running.
2013 - Indonesian investigators begin working to determine what caused a new Lion Air passenger jet to miss a runway while landing on the resort island of Bali, crashing into the sea without causing any fatalities among the 108 on board.
Today’s Birthdays:
Christian Huygens, Dutch mathematician-scientist (1629-1695); Loretta Lynn, US singer-songwriter (1932 -); Adrien Brody, US actor (1973 ); Sarah Michelle Gellar, US actress (1977-).