Copyright The Oregonian
Today in history: On Nov. 9, 1989, communist East Germany threw open its borders, allowing citizens to travel freely to the West for the first time in decades — a landmark event often referred to as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Also on this date: In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt made the first trip abroad of any sitting U.S. president in order to observe construction of the Panama Canal. In 1935, United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis and other labor leaders formed the Committee for Industrial Organization. In 1938, Nazis looted and burned synagogues as well as thousands of Jewish-owned stores and houses in Germany and Austria in a pogrom or deliberate persecution that became known as “Kristallnacht.” In 1965, the great Northeast blackout began with a series of power failures lasting up to 13 1/2 hours, leaving 30 million people in seven states and part of Canada without electricity. In 1976, the U.N. General Assembly approved resolutions condemning apartheid in South Africa, including one characterizing the white-ruled government as “illegitimate.” In 2007, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan placed opposition leader Benazir Bhutto under house arrest for a day and rounded up thousands of her supporters to block a mass rally against his emergency rule. Bhutto would be assassinated weeks later on Dec. 27 in a shooting and bombing attack that killed at least 20 people. In 2011, after 46 seasons as Penn State’s head football coach and a record 409 victories, Joe Paterno was fired along with the university president, Graham Spanier, over their handling of child sex abuse allegations against former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. In 2023, surgeons at Langone Health in New York announced that they performed the world’s first transplant of an entire human eye in May of that year, operating on a man whose face was badly damaged in an accident with high-voltage power lines.
