Today is Monday, Nov. 16, the 320th day of 2009. There are 45 days left in the year.
Today’s highlight:
On Nov. 16, 1959, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music,” inspired by the real-life story of the Trapp Family Singers, opened on Broadway with Mary Martin as Maria and Theodore Bikel as Capt. von Trapp.
On this date:
In 1776: British troops captured Fort Washington in New York during the American Revolution.
In 1885: Canadian rebel leader Louis Riel was executed for high treason.
In 1933: the United States and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations.
In 1961: House Speaker Samuel T. Rayburn died in Bonham, Texas, having served as speaker since 1940 except for two terms.
In 1966: Dr. Samuel Sheppard was acquitted in his second trial of murdering his pregnant wife, Marilyn, in 1954.
In 1999: Nathaniel Abraham, at 13 one of the youngest murder defendants in U.S. history, was convicted in Pontiac, Mich., of second-degree murder for shooting a stranger outside a convenience store with a rifle when he was 11. (Nathaniel was sentenced to juvenile detention until his 21st birthday; he was released in January 2007. However, he was sentenced in January 2009 to at least four years in prison for a drug-related conviction.)
In 2003: President George W. Bush picked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to be his new secretary of state, succeeding Colin Powell. Al-Jazeera television said it had received a video showing a hooded militant shooting a blindfolded woman in the head; it’s believed the woman was kidnapped aid worker Margaret Hassan.
Associated Press
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