Today in History....February 21

On this day in …

* 1885, the Washington Monument was dedicated

* 1916, the World War I Battle of Verdun began in France

* 1947, Edwin H. Land publicly demonstrated his Polaroid Land camera, which could produce a black-and-white photograph in 60 seconds

* 1965, former Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, 39, was shot to death in New York by assassins identified as Black Muslims

* 1972, President Nixon began his historic visit to China as he and his wife, Pat, arrived in Shanghai

* 1973, Israeli fighter planes shot down Libyan Arab Airlines Flight
114 over the Sinai Desert

* 1975, former Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman were sentenced to 2
1/2 to eight years in prison for their roles in the Watergate cover-up

* 1995, Chicago adventurer Steve Fossett became the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon, landing in Leader, Saskatchewan, Canada

* 1997, Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr reversed his decision to resign. ALSO: The space shuttle Discovery returned to earth after a mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope

* 2002, the State Department declared that beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was dead, a month after he'd been abducted by practitioners of that "religion of peace" in Pakistan

* 2006, President Bush endorsed the takeover of shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports by a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates, and pledged to veto any bill Congress might approve to block the agreement. (The agreement was eventually disolved by the company after extreme public pressure) ALSO: Donald Herbert, a brain-injured Buffalo, N.Y., firefighter who suddenly spoke after nearly a decade in a near-vegetative state, died at age 44