2008—At a Long Island Wal-Mart, shoppers literally bust doors and trample Jdimytai Damour, 34, to death.
2005—Ex-Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) pleads guilty to selling votes and dodging taxes.
1985—An internal Shell memo privately confirms everything its PR flaks are denying: CO2 from fossil fuels has been warming the globe for 100 years; seas are rising, and it’s getting worse.
1979—Bogus data from HQ sendsAir New Zealand Flight 901 into Antarctica’s Mount Erebus; 257 perish. HQ’s “orchestrated litany of lies” eventually fails, and HQ’s busted.
1945—“As I understand it from the doctors,” Gen. Leslie R. Groves tells a Senate committee, radiation poisoning “is a very pleasant way to die.”
1942—The Cocoanut Grove in Boston burns; 492 die, 172 are injured.
1936—Basil Zaharoff, the world’s fifth richest man, dies in bed at 87—four times older than those who died using the weapons he sold to all sides.
1925—The American Legion’s “Americanism” honcho says communists have no right to free speech.
1919—N.H.-born Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood—on active duty—says of radicals, “Ship ’em or shoot ’em.”
1858—The luxury yacht Wanderer, sleek, fast, and refitted for a trade outlawed 50 years earlier, docks at Jekyll Island, Georgia. The 409 enslaved Africans who survived the passage are the next-to-last such cargo to arrive.