This Day in History
In Alaska
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• In 1947, a B-29 bomber missing from Ladd Field, Fairbanks for four days was sighted on the northern Seward Peninsula. Six out of 11 survived the crash.
• In 1955, the eight crewmen of an Air Force C-119 "Flying Boxcar" escaped death as the aircraft crashed on takeoff at the Sparrevohn Radar Base in Western Alaska.
• In 1965, Vice President Hubert Humphrey stopped in Anchorage for 45 minutes en route to the Far East.
In the nation
• In 1932, Radio City Music Hall opened in New York City.
• In 1927, the musical play "Show Boat," with music by Jerome Kern and libretto by Oscar Hammerstein II, opened at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York.
• In 1947, the children's TV program "The Howdy Doody Show" made its debut on NBC under the title "Puppet Playhouse."
• In 2006, former Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards jumped into the presidential race a day earlier than he had planned after his campaign accidentally went live with his election Web site a day before his scheduled announcement.
In the world
• In 1831, naturalist Charles Darwin set out on a round-the-world voyage aboard the HMS Beagle.
• In 1904, James Barrie's play "Peter Pan: The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up" opened at the Duke of York's Theater in London.
• In 1945, 28 nations signed an agreement creating the World Bank.
• In 1949, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands signed an act granting sovereignty to Indonesia after more than three centuries of Dutch rule.
• In 1968, Apollo 8 and its three astronauts made a safe, nighttime splashdown in the Pacific.
• In 1979, Soviet forces seized control of Afghanistan. President Hafizullah Amin, who was overthrown and executed, was replaced by Babrak Karmal.
• In 1985, Palestinian guerrillas opened fire inside the Rome and Vienna airports; a total of 20 people were killed, including four of the attackers, who were slain by police and security personnel.
• In 1997, Billy Wright, Northern Ireland's most notorious Protestant militant, was shot to death by three members of the Irish National Liberation Army at the Maze Prison outside Belfast.
• In 2002, a defiant North Korea ordered U.N. nuclear inspectors to leave the country and said it would restart a laboratory capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. But the U.N. nuclear watchdog said its inspectors were "staying put" for the time being. A suicide truck-bomb attack destroyed the headquarters of Chechnya's Moscow-backed government, killing 72 people. Clonaid, a company founded by a religious sect that believes in space aliens, announced it had produced the world's first cloned baby, a claim subsequently dismissed by scientists for lack of proof.
• In 2006, Saddam Hussein urged Iraqis to embrace "brotherly coexistence" and not to hate U.S.-led foreign troops in a goodbye letter posted on a Web site a day after Iraq's highest court upheld his death sentence.