Today in History.....April 24

On this day in …

* 1704, "Boston News-Letter," the first successful newspaper in US, forms

* 1800, Congress approved a bill establishing the Library of Congress

* 1833, Jacob Evert and George Dulty patent soda fountain (American dating customs are forever altered)

* 1877, federal troops were ordered out of New Orleans, ending the North's post-Civil War rule in the South

* 1897, the first reporter, William Price (of The Washington Star), is assigned to White House

* 1898, Spain declared war on the United States after rejecting America's ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba

* 1915, the Ottoman Turkish Empire began the brutal mass deportation of Armenians during World War I

* 1953, British statesman Winston Churchill was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II

* 1961, JFK accepts "sole responsibility" following Bay of Pigs

* 1962, Sandy Koufax's second 18-strikeout game

* 1968, leftist students at Columbia University in New York began a weeklong occupation of several campus buildings

* 1970, the People's Republic of China launched its first satellite, which kept transmitting a song, "The East is Red"

* 1980, the United States launched an abortive attempt to free the American hostages in Iran being held by practitioners of that "relgion of peace", a mission that resulted in the deaths of eight U.S. servicemen

* 1981, the IBM-PC computer is introduced

* 1996, the main assembly of the Palestine Liberation Organization voted to revoke clauses in its charter that called for an armed struggle to destroy Israel. They never implemented it.

* 2001, the Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that police can arrest and handcuff people for minor traffic offenses