Today’s highlight

On Nov. 17, 1968, the last minutes of a tense NFL matchup on NBC between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders were preempted by the children’s film “Heidi.” The network received thousands of calls from angry viewers and formally apologized.

On this date

1869: The Suez Canal opened in Egypt.

1973: President Richard Nixon told a gathering of Associated Press managing editors at a televised news conference in Orlando, Florida: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”

1989: An estimated 10,000-15,000 Czechoslovakian students demonstrated in Prague against Communist rule; hundreds of thousands joined the protests in the following days. Dubbed the “Velvet Revolution,” the protests led to the resignation of the Communist Party’s leadership.

2003: Arnold Schwarzenegger was sworn in as the 38th governor of California.

2020: President Donald Trump fired the nation’s top election security official, Christopher Krebs, who had refuted Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud and vouched for the integrity of the vote.

Today’s birthdays

Film director Martin Scorsese is 82. Actor-model Lauren Hutton is 81. Actor-director Danny DeVito is 80. Basketball Hall of Fame coach Jim Boeheim is 80. “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels is 80. Film director Roland Joffe is 79.