Paradise Driver: 10/12/08

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Today is Sunday, Oct 12, the 286th day of 2008.
There are 80 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On Oct. 12, 1492 (Old Style calendar; Oct. 21 New Style), Christopher Columbus arrived with his expedition in the present-day Bahamas.

On this date:

In 1870, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee died in Lexington, Va., at age 63.
In 1908, the Detroit Tigers beat the Chicago Cubs 8-3 in Game 3 of the World Series, played in Chicago.
In 1915, English nurse Edith Cavell was executed by the Germans in occupied Belgium during World War I.
In 1918, the Cloquet Fire erupted in Minnesota, claiming some 450 lives.
In 1933, bank robber John Dillinger escaped from a jail in Allen County, Ohio, with the help of his gang, who killed the sheriff, Jess Sarber.
In 1960, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev disrupted a U.N. General Assembly session by pounding his desk with a shoe when a speaker criticized his country.
In 1968, the Summer Games of the 19th Olympiad officially opened in Mexico City.
In 1968, Equatorial Guinea became independent of Spain.
In 2000, 17 sailors were killed in a suicide bomb attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.
In 2002, a bomb blamed on Islamic militants destroyed a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people, many of them foreign tourists.

Ten years ago:

Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, died five days after being beaten and lashed to a fence; two men were charged with his murder. (Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney are serving life sentences.)
Three Americans, Robert F. Furchgott, Louis J. Ignarro and Dr. Ferid Murad, won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for blood vessel research.

Five years ago:

A suicide attack outside a Baghdad hotel full of Americans killed six bystanders.
Doctors in Dallas succeeded in separating 2-year-old conjoined twins from Egypt.
Germany won the Women's Soccer World Cup 2-1 over Sweden in the eighth minute of overtime.
Hall of Fame jockey Bill Shoemaker died in San Marino, Calif., at age 72.
Philanthropist Joan B. Kroc died in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., at age 75.
British wartime hero Patrick Dalzel-Job, whose exploits made him a model for James Bond, died in Plockton, Scotland, at age 90.

One year ago:

Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize for sounding the alarm over global warming.
A fiery, 34-vehicle pileup at a freeway tunnel in Santa Clarita, Calif., left three people dead.
A jury in Panama City, Fla., acquitted seven former juvenile boot camp guards and a nurse in a black teenager's death.

Today's Birthdays: