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Forces Treaty was signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev the following month.)
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• On this date:
• In 1784, Zachary Taylor, the 12th president of the United States, was born in Orange County, Va.
• In 1859, British naturalist Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species," which explained his theory of evolution by means of natural selection.
• In 1862, Confederate President Jefferson Davis appointed Gen. Joseph E. Johnston to command the Department of the West during the Civil War.
• In 1922, Irish nationalist and author Robert Erskine Childers was executed in Dublin by Free State forces.
• In 1939, British Overseas Airways Corp. (BOAC) was formally established.
• In 1941, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Edwards v. California, unanimously struck down a California law prohibiting people from bringing impoverished non-residents into the state.
• In 1950, the musical "Guys and Dolls," based on the writings of Damon Runyon and featuring songs by Frank Loesser (LEH'-suhr), opened on Broadway.
• In 1963, Jack Ruby shot and mortally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, in a scene captured on live television.
• In 1969, Apollo 12 splashed down safely in the Pacific.
• In 1971, a hijacker calling himself "Dan Cooper" (but who became popularly known as "D.B. Cooper") parachuted from a Northwest Orient Airlines 727 over the Pacific Northwest after receiving $200,000 dollars in ransom -- his fate remains unknown.
• In 1982, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., a Kenyan government economist and father of the president, was killed in an automobile accident in Nairobi; he was 46.
• In 1992, a China Southern Airlines Boeing 737 crashed in southern China, killing all 141 people on board.
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• Ten years ago: In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Iraqi government complained that the small print behind upcoming weapons inspections would give Washington a pretext to attack. Lucio Gutierrez, a populist former army colonel who'd led a coup in 2000, was elected Ecuador's sixth president in six years. Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's conservative party dominated parliamentary elections in Austria.
• Five years ago: A fast-moving wildfire pushed by Santa Ana winds raced

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