On This Day in History

1706 Statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston.
1806 Thomas Jefferson's daughter, Martha, gave birth to James Madison Randolph, the first child born in the White House.

1893 Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th president of the United States, died in Fremont, Ohio, at age 70.

1899 Gangster Al Capone was born in Brooklyn, N.Y.

1945 Soviet and Polish forces liberated Warsaw during World War II.

1945 Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews, disappeared in Hungary while in Soviet custody.

1946 The United Nations Security Council held its first meeting.

1961 In his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against the rise of "the military-industrial complex."

1966 - A B-52 carrying four H-bombs collided with a refuelling tanker. The bombs were released and eight crewmembers were killed.

1975 The first-born daughter of Maurice and Alicia McBride was born in Washington, DC.

1977 Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore was shot by a firing squad at Utah State Prison in the first U.S. execution in a decade.

1984 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the private use of home video cassette recorders to tape TV programs did not violate federal copyright laws.

1991 - Coalition air strikes began against Iraq after negotiations failed to get Iraq to retreat from the country of Kuwait.

1992 - An IRA bomb, placed next to a remote country road in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, killed seven building workers and injured seven others.

1994 - The Northridge earthquake rocked Los Angeles, CA, registering a 6.7 on the Richter Scale. At least 61 people were killed and about $20 billion in damage was caused.

1995 - More than 6,000 people were killed when an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2 devastated the city of Kobe, Japan.

1995 A magnitude 7.2 earthquake devastated the city of Kobe, Japan; more than 6,000 people were killed.

1997 A court in Ireland granted the first divorce in the Roman Catholic country's history.

1998 President Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to testify as a defendant in a criminal or civil suit when he answered questions from lawyers for Paula Jones, who had accused Clinton of sexual harassment.

2001 Faced with an electricity crisis, California used rolling blackouts to cut off power to hundreds of thousands of people.

2001 - Congo's President Laurent Kabila was shot and killed during a coup attempt. Congolese officials temporarily placed Kabila's son in charge of the government.

2001 - The director of Palestinian TV, Hisham Miki, was killed at a restaurant when three masked gunmen walked up to his table and shot him more than 10 times.

2006 The Supreme Court protected Oregon's assisted-suicide law, ruling that doctors there who helped terminally ill patients die could not be arrested under federal drug laws.