Today is Monday, Feb. 4, the 35th day of 2019.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Feb. 4, 1974, newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, 19, was kidnapped in Berkeley, California, by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army.
On this date:
In 1783, Britain’s King George III proclaimed a formal cessation of hostilities in the American Revolutionary War.
In 1789, electors chose George Washington to be the first president of the United States.
In 1861, delegates from six southern states that had recently seceded from the Union met in Montgomery, Alabama, to form the Confederate States of America.
In 1913, Rosa Parks, a black woman whose 1955 refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus to a white man sparked a civil rights revolution, was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee.
In 1938, the Thornton Wilder play “Our Town” opened on Broadway. Walt Disney’s animated feature “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” opened in general U.S. release.
In 1944, the Bronze Star Medal, honoring “heroic or meritorious achievement or service,” was authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In 1962, a rare conjunction of the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn occurred.
In 1983, pop singer-musician Karen Carpenter died in Downey, California, at age 32.
In 1987, pianist Liberace died at his Palm Springs, California, home at age 67.
In 1997, a civil jury in Santa Monica, California, found O.J. Simpson liable for the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.
In 1999, Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, was shot and killed in front of his Bronx home by four plainclothes New York City police officers. (The officers were acquitted at trial.)
In 2004, the Massachusetts high court declared that gay couples were entitled to nothing less than marriage, and that Vermont-style civil unions would not suffice. The social networking website Facebook had its beginnings as Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook.”
Ten years ago: President Barack Obama imposed a $500,000 cap on executive pay for companies receiving federal bailout money; the president also signed a bill extending health coverage to 4 million uninsured children. Lux Interior, co-founder and lead singer of the horror-punk band The Cramps, died in Glendale, Calif., at age 62.
Five years ago: The Congressional Budget Office said several million American workers would reduce their hours on the job or leave the workforce entirely because of incentives built into President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.
One year ago: The Philadelphia Eagles, led by backup quarterback Nick Foles, became NFL champs for the first time since 1960, beating Tom Brady and the New England Patriots 41-33 in the Super Bowl. An Amtrak passenger train slammed into a parked freight train in the early-morning darkness in South Carolina after a thrown switch sent it hurtling down a side track; the conductor and engineer were killed and more than 100 passengers were injured. Indianapolis Colts linebacker Edwin Jackson and his Uber driver were struck and killed as they stood on the shoulder of an Indianapolis highway. (The driver of the truck that hit them, a man from Guatemala living illegally in the United States, would be sentenced to 16 years in prison for the drunken-driving crash.) Actor John Mahoney, who played the dad of two psychiatrists on the TV show “Frasier,” died in Chicago at the age of 77.
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