Local

Feb. 21, 1990: Former Albert Lea resident Doug Johnson was named the best metropolitan teacher in Minneapolis-St.Paul Magazine. Johnson had been teaching at Birchview Elementary School in the Wayzata School District for 19 years.

Feb. 18, 1990: Ted Hinnenkamp, with the Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services office in Albert Lea, received an Economic and Social Justice Award from Gov. Rudy Perpich at the state capitol.

Feb. 23, 1960: The 108-day-old Wison & Co. strike came to an end. The rank and file membership overwhelmingly approved to a strike settlement and contract offer.

 

National

2018: In an interview airing on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said a “crime may have been committed” when President Donald Trump fired the head of the FBI and tried to publicly undermine an investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.

2015: Vice President Joe Biden opened a White House summit on countering extremism and radicalization, saying the United States needed to ensure that immigrants were fully included in the fabric of American society to prevent violent ideologies from taking root at home.

2010: President Barack Obama marked the one-year anniversary of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, saying it had staved off another Great Depression and kept up to 2 million people on the job.

The FBI concluded that Army scientist Bruce Ivins acted alone in the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people, and formally closed the case.

2006: Ten U.S. service members died when a pair of Marine Corps helicopters crashed off the coast of Africa.

1997: Astronauts on the space shuttle Discovery completed their tune-up of the Hubble Space Telescope after 33 hours of spacewalking; the Hubble was then released using the shuttle’s crane.

1988: Lt. Col. William Higgins, a Marine Corps officer serving with a United Nations truce monitoring group, was kidnapped in southern Lebanon by Iranian-backed terrorists (he was later slain by his captors).

1987: A bomb left by Unabomber Ted Kaczynski exploded behind a computer store in Salt Lake City, seriously injuring store owner Gary Wright.

1986: Johnson & Johnson announced it would no longer sell over-the-counter medications in capsule form, following the death of a woman who had taken a cyanide-laced Tylenol capsule.

The U.S. Senate approved, 83-11, the Genocide Convention, an international treaty outlawing “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” nearly 37 years after the pact was first submitted for ratification.

1983: Thirteen people were shot to death at a gambling club in Seattle’s Chinatown in what became known as the Wah Mee Massacre. (Two men were convicted of the killings and are serving life sentences; a third was found guilty of robbery and assault.)

1972: President Richard M. Nixon departed the White House with his wife, Pat, on a historic trip to China.

Feb. 18, 1970: The “Chicago Seven” defendants were found not guilty of conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic national convention; five were convicted of violating the Anti-Riot Act of 1968 (those convictions were later reversed).

1968: The children’s program “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” created by and starring Fred Rogers, made its network debut on National Educational Television, a forerunner of PBS, beginning a 31-season run.

1965: Black Muslim leader and civil rights activist Malcolm X, 39, was shot to death inside Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom in New York by assassins identified as members of the Nation of Islam. (Three men were convicted of murder and imprisoned; all were eventually paroled.)

Feb. 20, 1962: Astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth as he flew aboard Project Mercury’s Friendship 7 spacecraft, which circled the globe three times in a flight lasting 4 hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds before splashing down safely in the Atlantic Ocean 800 miles southeast of Bermuda.

Feb. 19, 1945: Operation Detachment began during World War II as some 30,000 U.S. Marines began landing on Iwo Jima, where they commenced a successful month-long battle to seize control of the island from Japanese forces.

1945: During the World War II Battle of Iwo Jima, the escort carrier USS Bismarck Sea was sunk by kamikazes with the loss of 318 men.

1942: During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for the relocation and internment of people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S.-born citizens.

Lt. Edward “Butch” O’Hare became the U.S. Navy’s first flying ace of World War II by shooting down five Japanese bombers while defending the aircraft carrier USS Lexington in the South Pacific.

1934: The U.S. Army Air Corps began delivering mail after President Franklin D. Roosevelt canceled private contracts that had come under suspicion. (The hastily arranged, ill-equipped military flights claimed the lives of a dozen pilots, sparking a public outcry before they were dropped several months later.)

1930: Photographic evidence of Pluto (now designated a “dwarf planet”) was discovered by Clyde W. Tombaugh at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

1905: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, upheld, 7-2, compulsory vaccination laws intended to protect the public’s health.

1878: Thomas Edison received a U.S. patent for “an improvement in phonograph or speaking machines.”

1864: During the Civil War, the Union ship USS Housatonic was rammed and sunk in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, by the Confederate hand-cranked submarine HL Hunley in the first naval attack of its kind; the Hunley also sank.

1815: The United States and Britain exchanged the instruments of ratification for the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812.

Feb. 17, 1801: The U.S. House of Representatives broke an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, electing Jefferson president; Burr became vice president.

1792: President George Washington signed an act creating the United States Post Office Department.