Today’s highlights

On Nov. 9, 1989, communist East Germany threw open its borders, allowing citizens to travel freely to the West for the first time in decades.

On this date

1906: Theodore Roosevelt made the first trip abroad of any sitting president in order to observe construction of the Panama Canal.

1935: United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis and other labor leaders formed the Committee for Industrial Organization.

1938: Nazis looted and burned synagogues as well as thousands of Jewish-owned stores and houses in Germany and Austria in a pogrom or deliberate persecution that became known as “Kristallnacht.”

1965: The great Northeast blackout began with a series of power failures lasting up to 13 1/2 hours, leaving 30 million people in seven states and part of Canada without electricity.

1976: The U.N. General Assembly approved resolutions condemning apartheid in South Africa, including one characterizing the white-ruled government as “illegitimate.”

2007: President Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan placed opposition leader Benazir Bhutto under house arrest for a day and rounded up thousands of her supporters to block a mass rally against his emergency rule.

Today’s birthdays

Film director Bille August is 76. Actor-bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno is 73. Rapper Scarface is 54. Blues singer Susan Tedeschi is 54. Golfer David Duval is 53.