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• In 1939, Britain's King George VI and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, arrived in Quebec on the first visit to Canada by a reigning British monarch.
• In 1946, President Harry S. Truman seized control of the nation's railroads, delaying - but not preventing - a threatened strike by engineers and trainmen.
• In 1961, Cuban leader Fidel Castro offered to release prisoners captured in the Bay of Pigs invasion in exchange for 500 bulldozers. (The prisoners were eventually freed in exchange for medical supplies.)
• In 1973, a special committee convened by the U.S. Senate began its televised hearings into the Watergate scandal.
• In 1974, four car bombs exploded in Dublin and Monaghan, Ireland, killing 33 people (the Ulster Volunteer Force claimed responsibility two decades later).
• In 1980, rioting that claimed 18 lives erupted in Miami's Liberty City after an all-white jury in Tampa acquitted four former Miami police officers of fatally beating black insurance executive Arthur McDuffie.
• In 1987, 37 American sailors were killed when an Iraqi warplane attacked the U.S. Navy frigate Stark in the Persian Gulf. (Iraq apologized for the attack, calling it a mistake, and paid more than $27 million in compensation.)
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• Ten years ago: Massachusetts became the first state to allow legal same-sex marriages. Abdel-Zahraa Othman, also known as Izzadine Saleem, head of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, was killed in a suicide car bombing in Baghdad. More than 100 people were killed in a prison fire in northern Honduras. Transsexuals were cleared to compete in the Olympics for the first time. The Michael Moore movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival. Actor Tony Randall died in New York at age 84.
• Five years ago: President Barack Obama strode head-on into the stormy abortion debate, telling graduates at the University of Notre Dame that both sides had to stop demonizing one another. In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers admitted defeat in their fierce quarter-century war for a separate homeland. Barbara Mandrell, Roy Clark and Charlie McCoy were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
• One year ago: The ousted head of the Internal Revenue Service, Steven Miller, faced hours of intense grilling before Congress; both defiant and apologetic, Miller acknowledged agency mistakes in targeting tea party groups for special scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status, but insisted that agents broke no laws and that there was no effort to cover up their actions. Jorge Rafael Videla, 87, the former dictator who took power in Argentina in a 1976 coup and led a military junta that killed thousands during a "dirty war" against so-called "subversives," died in Buenos

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