Today’s Highlight in History:
On Nov. 21, 1980, 87 people died in a fire at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.
On this date:
In 1789, North Carolina became the 12th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
In 1920, the Irish Republican Army killed 12 British intelligence officers and two auxiliary policemen in the Dublin area; British forces responded by raiding a soccer match, killing 14 civilians.
In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Air Quality Act.
In 1969, the Senate voted down the Supreme Court nomination of Clement F. Haynsworth, 55-45, the first such rejection since 1930.
In 1973, President Richard Nixon’s attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, revealed the existence of an 18-1/2-minute gap in one of the White House tape recordings related to Watergate.
In 1979, a mob attacked the U-S Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, killing two Americans.
In 1980, an estimated 83 million TV viewers tuned in to the CBS prime-time soap opera “Dallas” to find out “who shot J.R.” (The shooter turned out to be J.R. Ewing’s sister-in-law, Kristin Shepard.)
In 1985, U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard was arrested and accused of spying for Israel. (Pollard later pleaded guilty to espionage and was sentenced to life in prison.)
In 1990, junk-bond financier Michael R. Milken, who had pleaded guilty to six felony counts, was sentenced by a federal judge in New York to 10 years in prison. (Milken served two.)
In 1995, Balkan leaders meeting in Dayton, Ohio, initialed a peace plan to end 3 1/2 years of ethnic fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In 2001, Ottilie (AH’-tih-lee) Lundgren, a 94-year-old resident of Oxford, Connecticut, died of inhalation anthrax; she was the apparent last victim of a series of anthrax attacks carried out through the mail system.
In 2012, Israel and the Hamas militant group in Gaza agreed to a cease-fire to end eight days of the fiercest fighting in nearly four years.
In 2017, Zimbabwe’s 93-year-old president Robert Mugabe resigned; he was facing impeachment proceedings and had been placed under house arrest by the military.
In 2020, a federal judge in Pennsylvania tossed out a Trump campaign lawsuit seeking to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the state; in a scathing order, the judge said Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani presented only “speculative accusations.”
In 2021, a man drove an SUV into a suburban Milwaukee Christmas parade, leaving six people dead and more than 60 injured. (Darrell Brooks Jr. was convicted of 76 counts, including six counts of first-degree intentional homicide; he would be sentenced to life in prison with no chance of release.)
In 2022, NASA’s Orion capsule reached the moon, whipping around the far side and buzzing the lunar surface on its way to a record-breaking orbit with test dummies sitting in for astronauts in the first time a capsule visited the moon since NASA’s Apollo program 50 years ago.