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[†]
1996Olivia Breen, British Paralympic athlete[†]
Olivia Breen is a Welsh Paralympian athlete, who competes for Wales and Great Britain mainly in T38 sprint and F38 long jump events. She qualified for the 2012 Summer Paralympics and was selected for the T38 100m and 200m sprint and was also part of the T35-38 women's relay team. She has also represented Wales at the 2014, 2018 and 2022 Commonwealth Games winning gold in the F38 Long Jump in 2018 and gold in the T37/38 100m in 2022.
1996Max Winter, American businessman and sports executive (born 1903)[†]
Max Winter was a Minneapolis businessman and sport executive who helped found the Minnesota Vikings.
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As his fellow American swimmers go for the gold in Atlanta today, Bill Bulger will be reaching for his own moment of glory: he is trying to become the first person in living memory to swim around Lake Hopatcong, the state's largest lake. Mr. Bulger, a 5-foot-10, 220-pound, 53-year-old elevator repairman, was scheduled to hit the water last night. Except for a few 30-second breaks to refuel with pasta, Gatorade and pureed stew, he does not intend to stop until 24 hours later. Although the lake has a shoreline of more than 45 miles, Mr. Bulger said he intended to shave off a few coves and do his lap in about 25 miles. TERRY PRISTIN
MY daughter loves bugs. I do not. But I love my daughter, and so, on a recent Saturday morning, she and I hopped on the No. 7 subway train at Times Square and headed for the New York Hall of Science in Queens, where an exhibition called "Backyard Monsters: The World of Insects" is ensconced through Oct. 27. It was our first trip to the museum, which we found by disembarking at 111th Street in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, heading south four undistinguished blocks and cutting across a big, nearly empty parking lot. The building looms near Shea Stadium and the Unisphere, a lonely reminder of the 1964 World's Fair. In April, the museum celebrated the opening of its $13 million expansion, a new, inviting rotunda with space for a 300-seat theater, a restaurant and a new museum store.
IF you want to learn how some top executives shoulder responsibility at moments of truth, you can do worse than to examine recent news stories of New York origin and national import. The picture, many would agree, is not a pretty one. First, there is the continuing ordeal of Trans World Airlines Flight 800. Whatever is ultimately found to have blown up the plane, it is hard to see how T.W.A. will soon shake off the black eye it received for its performance in the first days of the crisis.
The Mexican Government helped the Clinton Administration neutralize a potentially difficult election-year problem today, announcing that early next month it would pay back $7 billion to the United States. The early payment will leave only $3.5 billion in outstanding loans from the bailout of Mexico last year, or slightly more than a quarter of the $12.5 billion that the Clinton Administration extended after Mexico came to the brink of national bankruptcy in early 1995. The repayments make it possible for President Clinton to contend that his action, which encountered considerable political resistance, helped prevent a global meltdown of the world's most promising emerging markets -- while creating a profit for the United States Treasury of more than $500 million, because of high interest rates charged to the Mexican Government.
I.B.M. said yesterday that its profits declined much less in the second quarter than analysts had expected and that its business would improve in the second half of the year. The combined reports sent I.B.M. shares soaring nearly 13 percent and sparked a rally that lifted the rest of the market. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped 67.32 points, closing at 5,422.01, while the Nasdaq composite index, which contains many smaller technology-related companies, rose 20.02 points, to 1,062.39. Shares of the International Business Machines Corporation closed at $103.625, up $11.875, on the New York Stock Exchange.
The Senate passed a bill yesterday that would ban the delivery of newspapers to people who do not want them, The Associated Press reported. Democratic opponents said the measure infringed on the newspapers' First Amendment rights to disseminate their publications, but Republican supporters said it was needed because throwaway newspapers were a nuisance. Under the bill, which goes to the Assembly, a newspaper would have 14 days to halt delivery after receiving a written request. After that, employees who make unwanted deliveries could be charged with littering, punishable by a $100 fine.
Results of a blood test show that Gov. Christine Todd Whitman has indeed been infected by a tick, as was suspected, but do not establish whether she has Lyme disease or some other tick-borne illness, a spokesman said yesterday. The Governor is feeling well enough to leave for Alaska later today for a family vacation, the spokesman, Carl Golden, said.
The pilot who was killed Wednesday when his single-engine plane crashed eight miles out at sea was identified yesterday as Albert J. Battifarano, 76, of Howell Township. Mr. Battifarano, who was flying solo, took off from Allaire Airport in Wall Township, where he was a familiar figure for the past 20 years. The cause of the crash is under investigation.
After spending almost three somber hours with relatives of the victims killed in the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, President Clinton announced yesterday that he had ordered several steps to tighten security at the nation's airports, including heightened scrutiny of passengers, luggage and cargo. Mr. Clinton said the new security measures were intended partly to calm the nerves of travelers worried by the crash, but he added that the Government had not yet drawn any conclusions about what caused it.
Markeisha Richardson is a tall, athletic 13-year-old who lives in Valley Green, a public-housing development built in 1961. By the 1980's, it had come to be known as Death Valley, for all the killings in and around its 312 apartments. Now the development is called Ghost Town, because most of the gunmen are either dead or locked up and because only eight families remain. They huddle together in a pair of two-story buildings, surrounded by dozens of boarded-up buildings as silent as tombstones in a graveyard.
Two of the most powerful members of Congress announced tonight that they had solved the major problem blocking passage of legislation to make health insurance more readily available to millions of Americans. The agreement was announced by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a co-sponsor of the legislation, and by Representative Bill Archer, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which wrote much of the bill.