Tuesday, February 9, 2010

On This Date In History

Tuesday, February 09th
The 040th day of 2010.
There are 325 days left in the year.

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Today's Highlights in History:

On Feb. 9, 1943, the World War II battle of Guadalcanal in the southwest Pacific ended with an American victory over Japanese forces.

On Feb. 9, 1910, Jacques Monod, the French Nobel Prize-winning biologist, was born.

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On this date in:

1773 - William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, was born in Charles City County, Va.


1825 - The House of Representatives elected John Quincy Adams president after no candidate received a majority of electoral votes.


1861 - The Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America elected Jefferson Davis president and Alexander H. Stephens vice president.


1870 - The U.S. Weather Bureau was established.


1942 - Daylight-saving "war time" went into effect in the United States, with clocks turned one hour forward.


1950 - Sen. Joseph McCarthy, during a speech in Wheeling, W.Va., charged that the State Department was riddled with Communists. (The Wisconsin Republican never provided any evidence to substantiate his claims.)


1964 - The Beatles made their first live American TV appearance, on "The Ed Sullivan Show."


1971 - Apollo 14 returned to Earth after man's third landing on the moon.


1984 - Soviet leader Yuri V. Andropov died less than 15 months after succeeding Leonid Brezhnev.


1993 - NBC News announced it had settled a defamation lawsuit brought by General Motors over the network's demonstration of a fiery pickup truck crash on "Dateline NBC."


1999 - The Senate began closed-door deliberations in President Bill Clinton's impeachment trial.


2002 - Britain's Princess Margaret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth II, died at age 71.


2009 - Following media reports, New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez admitted he took banned substances from 2001 to 2003.