Today in History.....May 23

On this day in …

* 1701, Captain William Kidd was hanged in London after he was convicted of piracy and murder

* 1934, bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death in a police ambush in Bienville Parish, La.

* 1944, during World War II, Allied forces bogged down in Anzio began a major breakout offensive

* 1945, Nazi official Heinrich Himmler committed suicide while imprisoned in Luneburg, Germany

* 1949, The Federal Republic of Germany (popularly known as West
Germany) is formally established as a separate and independent nation. This action marked the effective end to any discussion of reuniting East and West Germany

* 1960, Israel announced it had captured former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. (Eichmann was tried in Israel, found guilty of crimes against humanity, and hanged in 1962.)

* 1969, the lunar module of Apollo 10 flew to within nine miles of the moon's surface in a dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing

* 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeals of former Nixon White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman and former Attorney General John N. Mitchell in connection with their Watergate convictions

* 1994, four men convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center were each sentenced to 240 years in prison

* 1995, Apple Computer and AT&T announced they would collaborate on a videoconferencing system. Although videophones had been a popular feature in science fiction for more than thirty years, video conferencing was slow to catch on until the late 1990s when it became popular as a business tool

* 2001, U.S. Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont disclosed plans to leave the Republican Party and become an Independent, a move that led to Democratic control of the Senate for the first time in seven years