There were 3 events on this date involving federal law enforcement agencies. In 1985 the ATF and FBI laid siege to a white supremacist survivalist group compound in Arkansas. The group -The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) surrendered 2 days later. In 1993 the FBI was conducting a 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. This time it ended tragically when a fire (aided by the Davidians) roared through the compound, causing the deaths of leader David Koresh and 75 others including 18 children under the age of 10 then in 1995 the Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City, containing FBI and ATF offices, as well as a daycare center, was bombed by former Gulf War veteran and domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, resulting in the deaths of 168 people, including 19 children under the age of 6.
In 1861 a pro-secessionist mob in Baltimore Maryland attacked US Army troops marching through the city, while just over a hundred years later (1961) students in South Korea held a nationwide pro-democracy protest against autocratic President Syngman Rhee, eventually forcing him to resign.In space news, India’s first satellite Aryabhata was launched into orbit in 1975. In 2021 the Ingenuity helicopter took a brief flight on Mars – the first aircraft to fly on another planet.
Norwegian-American engineer Ole Evinrude was born in 1877 and later invented the outboard motor. FBI agent Eliot Ness (1903) and politician E. Clay Shaw (1939) were born this day – Ness to bust Al Capone and Shaw to add controversy, via Oliver Stone’s film, to the JFK assassination controversy. This date was the birthday of a number of movie stars: Jayne Mansfield (1933). Dudley Moore (1935), Tim Curry (1946), and Hayden Christensen (1981, Ani in the Star Wars prequel trilogy).
Walking off the world’s stage on this date were American physician and Founding Father Benjamin Rush (1813), English poet and Parliament member (House of Lords) Lord Byron (1824), two-time British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1881), and revolutionary biologist Charles Darwin (1882).
It was also the date we said farewell to French physicist and Nobel Prize winner Pierre Curie (1906), who won the Nobel Prize with his wife Marie, the first Chancellor of Germany in the post-WWII era Konrad Adenauer(1967), American journalist, author, and publisher – founder of US Today Al Neuharth (2013), and former US VP Walter Mondale (2021).
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