2006—Hotshot Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleads guilty to three felony counts for defrauding Indian tribes and bribing officials.
1967—Jack Ruby conveniently dies in prison while awaiting retrial.
1966—Ronald Reagan announces for Governorship of California, claiming it leads in bankruptcies and has 40% higher unemployment than the rest of the country, neither of which is true.
1966—Navy vet and civil rights activist Samuel L. Younge, Jr., 21, is murdered in Tuskeegee, Ala., by a white, 68-year-old gas station attendant later acquitted by an all-white jury.
1961—In Idaho, three military technicians are killed in a steam explosion at a nuclear reactor.
1955—The U.S. government announces that over 3,000 federal employees have been sacked to quell Joe McCarthy’s paranoia.
1943—Ball turret gunner SSgt. Alan Magee escapes without a parachute from a doomed B-17, falls 22,000 feet, and crashes through the roof of a St. Nazaire railroad station. He dies in 2003 at the age of 84.
1931—Fearing insurrection, merchants in England, Ark. hand over food to a mob of 500 hungry people.
1924—Tutankhamen’s tomb is robbed by a Brit, Howard Carter.
1891—Oz author L. Frank Baum, writing in the Aberdeen (S.D.) Saturday Pioneer, calls for the “total extermination” of Native Americans.