This Week in History: Albert Lea senior named to All-State baseball team

Published 8:32 pm Tuesday, June 2, 2020

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June 7, 1990: Brook Cuden and Eric Nyquist gave Albert Lea High School’s 106th annual commencement address. The graduation ceremonies took place at Southwest Junior High School.

June 3, 1990: Tigers senior first basemen Pete Christian was named to the 10-member 1990 Minnesota baseball academic All-State team. Christian was selected to the team after hitting .328 for the Tigers and maintaining a perfect 4.0 grade point average throughout high school. Christian was also the 1990 class valedictorian.

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National

2015: The Pentagon disclosed that it had inadvertently shipped possibly live anthrax to at least 51 laboratories across the U.S. and in three foreign countries over the previous decade, but said that public health was not at risk.

2013: U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians, many of them sleeping women and children, pleaded guilty to murder at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, to avoid the death penalty; he was sentenced to life in prison.

2010: Joran van der Sloot, long suspected in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway in Aruba, was arrested in Chile following the slaying of 21-year-old Stephany Flores in Peru. (Van der Sloot is serving a 28-year sentence for Flores’ murder.)

2009: General Motors filed for Chapter 11, becoming the largest U.S. industrial company to enter bankruptcy protection.

Scott Roeder, an anti-abortion activist, was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas. (Roeder was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 50 years.)

2008: Barack Obama claimed the Democratic presidential nomination, speaking in the same St. Paul, Minnesota, arena where Republicans would be holding their national convention in September 2008.

2002: Fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her Salt Lake City home. (Smart was found alive by police in a Salt Lake suburb in March 2003. One kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, is serving a prison sentence; the other, Wanda Barzee, was released in September, 2018.)

June 4, 1998: A federal judge sentenced Terry Nichols to life in prison for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

1997: Timothy McVeigh was convicted of murder and conspiracy in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people. (McVeigh was executed in June 2001.)

1995: A U.S. Air Force F-16C was shot down by a Bosnian Serb surface-to-air missile while on a NATO air patrol in northern Bosnia; the pilot, Capt. Scott F. O’Grady, was rescued by U.S. Marines six days later.

1990: Dr. Jack Kevorkian carried out his first publicly assisted suicide, helping Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old Alzheimer’s patient from Portland, Oregon, end her life in Oakland County, Michigan.

1981: The Centers for Disease Control reported that five homosexuals in Los Angeles had come down with a rare kind of pneumonia; they were the first recognized cases of what later became known as AIDS.

1977: The United States and Cuba agreed to set up diplomatic interests sections in each other’s countries; Cuba also announced the immediate release of 10 Americans jailed on drug charges.

June 5, 1968: Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot and mortally wounded after claiming victory in California’s Democratic presidential primary at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles; assassin Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was arrested at the scene.

1966: U.S. space probe Surveyor 1 landed on the moon and began transmitting detailed photographs of the lunar surface.

June 3, 1965: Astronaut Edward H. White became the first American to “walk” in space during the flight of Gemini 4.

1943: Los Angeles saw the beginning of its “Zoot Suit Riots” as white servicemen clashed with young Latinos wearing distinctive-looking zoot suits; the violence finally ended when military officials declared the city off limits to enlisted personnel.

1940: During World War II, the Allied military evacuation of some 338,000 troops from Dunkirk, France, ended. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

1939: The German ocean liner MS St. Louis, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Germany, was turned away from the Florida coast by U.S. officials.

1919: Congress approved the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing citizens the right to vote regardless of their gender, and sent it to the states for ratification.

1916: Louis Brandeis took his seat as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the first Jewish American to serve on the nation’s highest bench.

1816: A snowstorm struck the northeastern U.S., heralding what would become known as the “Year Without a Summer.”