Today in History
Published 11:33 pm Monday, September 28, 2009
Today is Tuesday, Sept. 29, the 272nd day of 2009. There are 93 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
On Sept. 29, 1978, Pope John Paul I was found dead in his Vatican apartment just over a month after becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.
ON THIS DATE
In 1789, the U.S. War Department established a regular army with a strength of several hundred men.
In 1938, British, French, German and Italian leaders concluded the Munich Agreement, which was aimed at appeasing Adolf Hitler by allowing Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
In 1979, Pope John Paul II began the first papal visit to Ireland as he arrived for a three-day tour.
In 1982, Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide claimed the first of seven victims in the Chicago area. (To date, the case remains unsolved.)
In 1988, the space shuttle Discovery blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., marking America’s return to manned space flight following the Challenger disaster.
In 1999, Vice President Al Gore abruptly moved his presidential campaign headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Nashville, Tenn., to get “out of the Beltway and into the heartland.” The Associated Press reported on the killing of South Korean refugees by U.S. soldiers in the early days of the Korean War, beneath a bridge at a hamlet called No Gun Ri; The Associated Press quoted ex-GIs as saying “hundreds” were shot dead in late July 1950. (In 2001, after its own investigation, the U.S. Army affirmed that killings had occurred, but said they were not deliberate.)
In 2004, a video surfaced showing Kenneth Bigley, a British hostage held by Iraqi militants, pleading for help between the bars of a makeshift cage. (Bigley was later killed.) The privately built SpaceShipOne rocket plane hurtled past the edge of earth’s atmosphere, completing the first stage of a quest to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
In 2008, on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 777 points after the House defeated, 228-205, a $700 billion emergency rescue for the nation’s financial system, leaving both parties and the Bush administration scrambling to pick up the pieces.
Associated Press
