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• Today is Saturday, May 18, the 138th day of 2013. There are 227 days left in the year.
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• Today's Highlight in History:
• On May 18, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a measure creating the Tennessee Valley Authority.
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• On this date:
• In 1642, the Canadian city of Montreal was founded by French colonists.
• In 1765, about one-fourth of Montreal was destroyed by a fire.
• In 1863, the Siege of Vicksburg began during the Civil War, ending July 4 with a Union victory.
• In 1896, the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, endorsed "separate but equal" racial segregation, a concept renounced 58 years later in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
• In 1910, Halley's Comet passed by earth, brushing it with its tail.
• In 1926, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson vanished while visiting a beach in Venice, Calif. (McPherson reappeared more than a month later, saying she'd escaped after being kidnapped and held for ransom.)
• In 1944, during World War II, Allied forces finally occupied Monte Cassino in Italy after a four-month struggle with Axis troops.
• In 1953, Jacqueline Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier as she piloted a Canadair F-86 Sabre jet over Rogers Dry Lake, Calif.
• In 1969, astronauts Eugene A. Cernan, Thomas P. Stafford and John W. Young blasted off aboard Apollo 10 on a mission to orbit the moon.
• In 1973, Harvard law professor Archibald Cox was appointed Watergate special prosecutor by U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson.
• In 1980, the Mount St. Helens volcano in Washington state exploded, leaving 57 people dead or missing.
• In 1991, Helen Sharman became the first Briton to rocket into space as she flew aboard a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft with two cosmonauts on an eight-day mission to the Mir space station.
(Continued on page 37)
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