Local

Feb. 8, 1990: District 241 Superintendent Cy Kruse was appointed to the Blue-Ribbon Committee on Mentoring and Youth Services by Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich.

Feb. 7, 1990: Albert Lea Mayor Harlan Nelson was made an honorary DECA member by Albert Lea Technical College Chapter President and State Chapter Vice President RuAnna Pestorious.

Feb. 10, 1970: Albert Lea was overrun by a posse of clowns as the Albert Lea Clown Club got active selling tickets for their “Hard Times” dance that was at Union Center.

Feb. 10, 1960: Freeborn County Sheriff Everette Stovern intensified investigation into numerous acts of arson in Albert Lea, Freeborn, Wells and Hollandale. The State Deputy Fire Marshal J.G. Thaung was called in to help with the investigation.

 

National

2008: The Bush White House defended the use of the interrogation technique known as waterboarding, saying it was legal — not torture as critics argued — and had saved American lives.

Feb. 4, 2004: The social networking website Facebook had its beginnings as Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook.”

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.

Feb. 6, 2003: Edging closer to war, President George W. Bush declared “the game is over” for Saddam Hussein and urged skeptical allies to join in disarming Iraq.

Feb. 5, 2001: Four disciples of Osama bin Laden went on trial in New York in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. (The four were convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.)

1995: The space shuttle Discovery flew to within 37 feet of the Russian space station Mir in the first rendezvous of its kind in two decades.

1994: White separatist Byron De La Beckwith was convicted in Jackson, Mississippi, of murdering civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963, and was immediately sentenced to life in prison. (Beckwith died Jan. 21, 2001 at age 80.)

1993: President Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, granting workers up to 12 weeks unpaid leave for family emergencies.

1989: 144 people were killed when an American-chartered Boeing 707 filled with Italian tourists slammed into a fog-covered mountain in the Azores.

1984: Space shuttle Challenger astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart went on the first untethered spacewalk, which lasted nearly six hours.

1974: Newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, 19, was kidnapped in Berkeley, California, by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army.

1973: Senate leaders named seven members of a select committee to investigate the Watergate scandal, including its chairman, Sen. Sam J. Ervin, D-N.C.

1971: Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell stepped onto the surface of the moon in the first of two lunar excursions.

NASDAQ, the world’s first electronic stock exchange, held its first trading day.

1968: Three college students were killed in a confrontation between demonstrators and highway patrolmen at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg in the wake of protests over a whites-only bowling alley.

Feb. 7, 1964: The Beatles arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to begin their first American tour.

1962: President John F. Kennedy imposed a full trade embargo on Cuba.

1945: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin began a wartime conference at Yalta.

1944: The Bronze Star Medal, honoring “heroic or meritorious achievement or service,” was authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

1943: The government abruptly announced that wartime rationing of shoes made of leather would go into effect in two days, limiting consumers to buying three pairs per person per year. (Rationing was lifted in October 1945.)

1937: President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed increasing the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices; the proposal, which failed in Congress, drew accusations that Roosevelt was attempting to “pack” the nation’s highest court.

1933: The 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the so-called “lame duck” amendment, was proclaimed in effect by Secretary of State Henry Stimson.

Feb. 8, 1924: The first execution by gas in the United States took place at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City as Gee Jon, a Chinese immigrant convicted of murder, was put to death.

1918: During World War I, the Cunard liner SS Tuscania, which was transporting about 2,000 American troops to Europe, was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the Irish Sea with the loss of more than 200 people.

1910: The Boy Scouts of America was incorporated.

1789: Electors chose George Washington to be the first president of the United States.

1778: During the American Revolutionary War, the United States won official recognition and military support from France with the signing of a Treaty of Alliance in Paris.