Today is Thursday, Feb. 13, the 44th day of 2020. There are 322 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Air Force Major General Charles E. ‘‘Chuck’’ Yeager (ret.) is 97. Actress Kim Novak is 87. Actor George Segal is 86. Actor Bo Svenson is 79. Actress Stockard Channing is 76. Talk show host Jerry Springer is 76. Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, is 74. Singer Peter Gabriel is 70. Singer Henry Rollins is 59. Actor Neal McDonough is 54. The National singer Matt Berninger is 49. Singer-songwriter Feist is 44. Rhythm-and-blues performer Natalie Stewart is 41.
In 1633, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome for trial before the Inquisition, accused of defending Copernican theory that the Earth revolved around the sun instead of the other way around. (Galileo was found vehemently suspect of heresy and ended up being sentenced to a form of house arrest.)
In 1861, Abraham Lincoln was officially declared winner of the 1860 presidential election as electors cast their ballots.
In 1935, a jury in Flemington, N.J., found Bruno Richard Hauptmann guilty of first-degree murder in the kidnap-slaying of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. (Hauptmann was later executed.)
In 1945, during World War II, Allied planes began bombing the German city of Dresden. The Soviets captured Budapest from the Germans.
In 1965, during the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized Operation Rolling Thunder, an extended bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese.
In 1974, Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union.
In 1991, during Operation Desert Storm, allied warplanes destroyed an underground shelter in Baghdad that had been identified as a military command center; Iraqi officials said 500 civilians were killed.
In 2000, Tiger Woods saw his streak of six consecutive victories come to an end as he fell short to Phil Mickelson in the Buick Invitational.
In 2002, John Walker Lindh pleaded not guilty in federal court in Alexandria, Va., to conspiring to kill Americans and supporting the Taliban and terrorist organizations. (Lindh later pleaded guilty to lesser offenses and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was released in September 2019 after serving 17 years of that sentence.)
In 2013, beginning a long farewell to his flock, a weary Pope Benedict XVI celebrated his final public Mass as pontiff, presiding over Ash Wednesday services inside St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.
In 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia, the influential conservative and most provocative member of the Supreme Court, was found dead at a private residence in the Big Bend area of West Texas; he was 79.
Last year, NASA’s Mars rover “Opportunity,’’ which had been built to operate for just three months on the planet’s surface but kept rolling for years longer, was finally declared to be no longer operational, 15 years after it landed on Mars.
