TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Saturday, Feb. 10, the 41st day of 2024. There are 325 days left in the year. On this date in:
1763: Britain, Spain and France signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War in North America).
1840: Britain’s Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
1936: Nazi Germany’s Reichstag passed a law investing the Gestapo secret police with absolute authority, exempt from any legal review.
1959: A major tornado tore through the St. Louis area, killing 21 people and causing heavy damage.
1962: The Soviet Union exchanged captured American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers for Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy held by the United States.
1967: The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, dealing with presidential disability and succession, was ratified as Minnesota and Nevada adopted it.
1981: Eight people were killed when a fire set by a busboy broke out at the Las Vegas Hilton hotelcasino.
1989: Ron Brown was elected the first Black chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
1996: World chess champion Garry Kasparov lost the first game of a match in Philadelphia against an IBM computer dubbed “Deep Blue.” (Kasparov ended up winning the match, 4 games to 2; he was defeated by Deep Blue in a rematch the following year.)
2005: North Korea boasted publicly for the first time that it possessed nuclear weapons.
2021: Larry Flynt, who turned his raunchy Hustler magazine into an empire while fighting numerous First Amendment court battles, died at age 78 in LA.