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• On this date:
• In 1761, the first American life insurance policy was issued in Philadelphia to a Rev. Francis Allison, whose premium was six pounds per year.
• In 1860, the United States and Japan exchanged ratifications of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce during a ceremony in Washington.
• In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appeared before Congress to explain his decision to veto a bill that would have allowed World War I veterans to cash in bonus certificates before their 1945 due date.
• In 1939, the foreign ministers of Germany and Italy, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Galeazzo Ciano, signed a "Pact of Steel" committing the two countries to a military alliance.
• In 1947, the Truman Doctrine was enacted as Congress appropriated military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey.
• In 1960, an earthquake of magnitude 9.5, the strongest on record, struck southern Chile, claiming some 1,655 lives.
• In 1962, Continental Airlines Flight 11, en route from Chicago to Kansas City, Mo., crashed after a bomb apparently brought on board by a passenger exploded, killing all 45 occupants of the Boeing 707.
• In 1968, the nuclear-powered submarine USS Scorpion, with 99 men aboard, sank in the Atlantic Ocean. (The remains of the sub were later found on the ocean floor 400 miles southwest of the Azores.)
• In 1969, the lunar module of Apollo 10, with Thomas P. Stafford and Eugene Cernan aboard, flew to within nine miles of the moon's surface in a dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing.
• In 1972, the island nation of Ceylon became the republic of Sri Lanka.
• In 1981 "Yorkshire Ripper" Peter Sutcliffe was convicted in London of murdering 13 women and was sentenced to life in prison.
• In 1992, after a reign lasting nearly 30 years, Johnny Carson hosted NBC's "Tonight Show" for the last time.
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• Ten years ago: A jury in Birmingham, Ala., convicted former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry of murder in a 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls. (Cherry, sentenced to life, died in a prison hospital in 2004.) The remains of Chandra Levy, the federal intern who'd disappeared more than a year earlier, were found in Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek Park.
• Five years ago: British prosecutors accused former KGB agent Andrei Lugovoi (AHN'-dray LOO'-goh-voy) of murder in the radioactive poisoning of Alexander Lit

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