Monday, October 12th
The 285th day of 2009.
There are 80 days left in the year.
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Today's Highlights in History
On Oct. 12, 1870, Gen. Robert E. Lee died in Lexington, Va., at age 63. (Go to article.)
On Oct. 12, 1860, Elmer Sperry, the American inventor best known for perfecting the use of gyroscopes, was born. Following his death on June 16, 1930, his obituary appeared in The Times. (Go to obit. | Other Birthdays)
Editorial Cartoon of the Day
On October 12, 1861, Harper's Weekly featured a cartoon about Senator John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky and the Civil War. (See the cartoon and read an explanation.)
On this date in:
1492 (Old Style calendar; Oct. 21st New Style), Christopher Columbus arrived with his expedition in the present-day Bahamas.
1935 Opera singer Luciano Pavarotti was born in Modena, Italy.
1960 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev disrupted a U.N. General Assembly session by pounding his desk with a shoe during a dispute.
1971 "Jesus Christ Superstar," a rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, opened on Broadway.
1973 President Richard Nixon nominated House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, R-Mich., to succeed Spiro T. Agnew as vice president.
1984 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher escaped an attempt on her life when an Irish Republican Army bomb exploded at a hotel in Brighton, England, killing five people.
1986 Superpower talks in Reykjavik, Iceland, ended in stalemate, with President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev unable to agree on arms control or a date for a full-fledged summit in the United States.
1997 Singer John Denver, 53, died in the crash of his privately built aircraft in Monterey Bay, Calif.
1998 Matthew Shepard, a gay student at University of Wyoming, died five days after he was beaten, robbed and left tied to a wooden fence post outside of Laramie.
1999 Pakistan's military overthrew the democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
2000 Two suicide bombers in an explosives-laden boat rammed into the destroyer the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailors.
2002 A bomb destroyed a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people, many of them foreign tourists. Islamic militants linked to al-Qaida were blamed.
2007 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.
2008 North Korea said it would resume dismantling its main nuclear facilities, hours after the United States removed the communist country from a list of states that sponsored terrorism.
