On this day
Revisit the news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
In 1996, the world population was approximately 5,842,055,734 people[†]
1996Sam Bennett, Canadian ice hockey player[†]
Samuel Hunter Bennett is a Canadian professional ice hockey forward for the Florida Panthers of the National Hockey League (NHL). Bennett was rated by the NHL Central Scouting Bureau as the top North American prospect for the 2014 NHL entry draft, where he was selected fourth overall by the Calgary Flames. Bennett made his NHL debut in the 2014–15 season. Bennett won the Stanley Cup with the Panthers in 2024.
1996Space Shuttle Columbia launches on STS-78 to conduct life science and microgravity research aboard the Spacelab module.[†]
Space Shuttle Columbia (OV-102) was a Space Shuttle orbiter manufactured by Rockwell International and operated by NASA. Named after the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe, and the female personification of the United States, Columbia was the first of five Space Shuttle orbiters to fly in space, debuting the Space Shuttle launch vehicle on its maiden flight on April 12, 1981 and becoming the first spacecraft to be re-used after its first flight when it launched on STS-2 on November 12, 1981. As only the second full-scale orbiter to be manufactured after the Approach and Landing Test vehicle Enterprise, Columbia retained unique external and internal features compared to later orbiters, such as test instrumentation and distinctive black chines. In addition to a heavier aft fuselage and the retention of an internal airlock throughout its lifetime, these made Columbia the heaviest of the five spacefaring orbiters: around 1,000 kilograms heavier than Challenger and 3,600 kilograms heavier than Endeavour when originally constructed. Columbia also carried ejection seats based on those from the SR-71 during its first six flights until 1983, and from 1986 onwards carried an imaging pod on its vertical stabilizer.
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House Approves Sanctions Against Investment in Iran The House of Representatives unanimously approved harsh economic sanctions against foreign companies that invest in Iran, widening the split between the United States and its allies over the use of American economic power.
REMEMBER in "I Love Lucy" how Lucy and Ricky and Fred and Ethel always took their vacations together? And how, when the Ricardos moved to Westport, the Mertzes moved in with them? And how things like that never happened in real life? Guess again.
After three days of deliberations, jurors said yesterday that they were deadlocked in the trial of a dentist accused of murdering a woman during a bungled robbery last year at her Franklin Township jewelry store. But Superior Court Judge Leonard N. Arnold of Somerset County ordered the panel to resume deliberations today. Prosecutors said the dentist, Dr. Harry Insabella, was the New Jersey connection for a group of four men in Missouri who flew east to rob the store owned by Jeffrey and Brenda Wolf.
At the state Republican convention in Iowa last weekend, the party approved a platform that supports a total ban on a late-term abortion procedure and describes in detail how it is performed. At the state party convention in Maine several days earlier, angry delegates found themselves shouting at one another over whether a party member should be allowed to deliver a graphic description of the procedure, what he called partial-birth abortion in an address to the party.
When a natural gas pipeline exploded in Edison in March 1994, 100 people were injured and 300 lost their homes. In addition to coping with this destruction, residents of the Durham Woods apartment complex also had to deal with a small army of lawyers seeking to represent them in lawsuits against the pipeline company. Today, the State Supreme Court's Committee on Attorney Advertising will announce whether it will discipline any of the five lawyers accused of improperly soliciting clients at the explosion site, said the committee's secretary, Israel Dubin. New Jersey's Rules of Professional Conduct state that lawyers may not directly contact potential clients "concerning a specific event when such contact has pecuniary gain as a significant motive."
For the second time in a year, prosecutors have charged dozens of New York City employees with welfare fraud, accusing them of illegally obtaining thousands of dollars in public assistance while they were collecting city paychecks. Forty-six current and former city workers, including several teachers, have been charged with grand larceny, District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau of Manhattan and Commissioner of Investigation Howard Wilson announced yesterday.
The Navistar International Corporation, North America's biggest producer of trucks and school buses, said yesterday that it would eliminate 3,000 of the 5,000 jobs at its huge factory in Springfield, Ohio, and move its heavy truck production elsewhere by 1999. Andy Opila, a spokesman for Navistar, said that no decision had been made on where the company would move the heavy truck production. "We are evaluating our options," he said.
SIR ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER, the fin-de-siecle Pooh-Bah of Popular Culture, was putting the finishing touches on a column for The Daily Telegraph of London the other day, whizzing past the Burne-Jones painting that hovers above the circular staircase in his duplex at Trump Tower. The subject, of the hour and the column, was one that has transfixed him since boyhood, when he would carry around his tattered copy of T. Francis Bumpus's "Guide to London Churches (Volume 2 -- Victorian)," annotations feverishly scribbled in the margins.
Saying he had to kill them "because they were evil," a reclusive man obsessed with guns and the Bible has admitted slaying three people and wounding five others in two calculated waves that bound many New Yorkers in a fitful terror and became known as the Zodiac shootings, police officials said yesterday. The stunning admission to the twin crime sprees -- one during a compressed period in 1990 and the second from 1992 to 1994 -- apparently closes one of the city's most notorious unsolved cases, a chilling episode of a killer who, under the cover of darkness, mockingly promised to methodically deliver one death for each of the 12 signs of the Zodiac.
IT is because of New York City's crackdown on quality-of-life crimes that the Police Department was able to arrest John J. Royster, the man charged with murdering one woman and beating up three others in attacks that even detectives failed to link until they were able to identify his fingerprint from an earlier fare-beating arrest. It is also because of the same police crackdown that hundreds of people are spending hours, even days, in crowded holding cells waiting just to be charged.
Downsizing is coming to Western Europe's white-collar workers, and fast. It is straining families, communities and politics on a continent on which 11 percent of available workers are already unemployed, double the rate in the United States.