Today:
1. 1876: Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for his invention of the telephone.
2. 1936: Adolf Hitler violated the Treaty of Versailles by sending German troops into the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone along the French border.
3. 1965: Civil rights activists began a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, advocating for African American voting rights. The march would later become known as “Bloody Sunday” due to the violent confrontation with law enforcement.
4. 1989: Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (religious decree) calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie over his book “The Satanic Verses,” which was considered blasphemous by many Muslims.
5. 2009: The Kepler space observatory, a NASA mission designed to discover Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting other stars, was launched.
6. 2014: Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. The disappearance sparked one of the most extensive search efforts in aviation history, but the plane’s fate remains unknown.
7. 2017: WikiLeaks released a trove of documents purportedly detailing hacking tools used by the CIA for cyber espionage. The release, known as “Vault 7,” raised concerns about the agency’s surveillance capabilities.
8. 2019: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS), marking a significant milestone in NASA’s Commercial Crew Program and the future of space exploration.
9. 2020: Italy implemented a nationwide lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, becoming one of the first countries outside of China to take such drastic measures to contain the spread of the virus.
10. 2021: The United States House of Representatives passed the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package aimed at addressing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.