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On this day, Oct. 14 …
1964: Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. is named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. (He would receive the award on Dec. 10, 1964.)
Also on this day:
1912: Theodore Roosevelt, campaigning for the presidency, is shot in the chest in Milwaukee. Despite the wound, he goes ahead with a scheduled speech.
1930: Ethel Merman makes her Broadway debut in the musical comedy “Girl Crazy” with songs by George and Ira Gershwin.
1933: Nazi Germany announces it is withdrawing from the League of Nations.
1947: U.S. Air Force Capt. Charles E. (“Chuck”) Yeager becomes the first test pilot to break the sound barrier as he flies the experimental Bell XS-1 (later X-1) rocket plane over Muroc Dry Lake in California.
1960: The idea of a Peace Corps is suggested by Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy to an audience of students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
1968: The first successful live telecast from a manned U.S. spacecraft is transmitted from Apollo 7.
1981: The new president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, is sworn in to succeed the assassinated Anwar Sadat. Mubarak pledges loyalty to Sadat’s policies.
1987: A 58-hour drama begins in Midland, Texas, as 18-month-old Jessica McClure slides 22 feet down a narrow abandoned well at a private daycare center.
2003: John Allen Muhammad pleads not guilty to murder as the first trial in the deadly Washington-area sniper rampage gets under way in Virginia Beach, Va. (Muhammad would be convicted of killing Dean Harold Meyers and executed in 2009.)
2009: The Unification Church holds the largest mass wedding in a decade, with some 40,000 people participating in dozens of cities around the world.
2009: NASCAR founder Bill France Sr. headlines the five inductees into the first Hall of Fame class; Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, Bill France Jr. and Junior Johnson are the others.
2014: A second nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas comes down with Ebola after contracting it from a dying patient. (The nurse, Amber Joy Vinson, would be later declared free of the disease.)
2017: A truck bombing in Somalia’s capital kills more than 500 people in one of the world’s deadliest attacks in years; officials blame the attack on the extremist group al-Shabab and say it was meant to target Mogadishu’s international airport, but the bomb detonated in a crowded street after soldiers opened fire.
2017: The board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revokes the membership of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein after published reports about sexual harassment and rape allegations against Weinstein.
