On this date in:
1807Former Vice President Aaron Burr was found innocent of treason.
1905Alberta and Saskatchewan became the eighth and ninth provinces of Canada.
1923The Japanese cities of Tokyo and Yokohama were devastated by an earthquake that claimed some 150,000 lives.
1932New York City Mayor James "Gentleman Jimmy" Walker resigned following charges of graft and corruption in his administration.
1942A federal judge in Sacramento, Calif., upheld the wartime detention of Japanese-Americans as well as Japanese nationals.
1951The United States, Australia and New Zealand signed a mutual defense pact, the ANZUS treaty.
1969A coup in Libya brought Moammar Gadhafi to power.
1972American Bobby Fischer won the international chess crown in Reykjavik, Iceland, defeating Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union.
1981Albert Speer, a close associate of Adolf Hitler who ran the Nazi war machine, died at a London hospital at age 76.
1983A Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 was shot down by a Soviet jet fighter after the airliner entered Soviet airspace; 269 people were killed.
1998Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals hit his 56th and 57th home runs of the season, breaking the National League record set by Hack Wilson in 1930.
2004More than 1,100 people were taken hostage by heavily armed Chechen militants at a school in Beslan in southern Russia; more than 330 people, most of them children, were killed during the three-day ordeal.
2007Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, announced that he would resign in the wake of fallout over his guilty plea in a Minnesota airport gay sex sting. (Craig later reversed his decision, saying he would serve out the rest of his term.)
2008Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, John McCain's choice to be his running mate on the Republican ticket, revealed that her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant.
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