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Today is Sunday, November 17, the 322nd day of 2024. There are 44 days left in the year.
Today in history:
On November 17, 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born actor who had become one of America’s biggest movie stars in the 1980s and 1990s, was sworn in as the 38th governor of California.
Also on this date:
In 1800, Congress held its first session in the partially completed U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC
In 1869, the Suez Canal opened in Egypt.
In 1973, President Richard Nixon told a gathering of Associated Press editors at a televised news conference in Orlando, Florida, “People need to know whether their president is a crook or not. Well, I’m not a crook.”
In 1968, the final minutes of a thrilling NFL game on NBC between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders were undermined by the children’s film “Heidi.” The network received thousands of calls from angry viewers and formally apologized.
In 1989, an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Czechoslovak students demonstrated in Prague against communist rule; hundreds of thousands joined the protests in the following days. The protests, dubbed the “Velvet Revolution” because of their nonviolent nature, led to the resignation of the Communist Party leadership on November 28.
In 1997, 62 people, most of whom were foreign tourists, were killed when militants opened fire on the Temple of Hatshepsut (haht-shehp-SOOT’) in Luxor, Egypt; the attackers were killed by police.
In 2020, President Donald Trump fired the nation’s top election security official, Christopher Krebs, who had refuted Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud and vouched for the integrity of the vote.
Today’s Birthdays:
- Film director Martin Scorsese (skor-SEH’-see) 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.
- Basketball Hall of Famer Elvin Hayes is 79.
- Film director Roland Joffe is 79.
- Former Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner (BAY’-nur) is 75.
- Actor Stephen Root is 73.
- TV presenter-entertainer RuPaul is 64.
- Actor Dylan Walsh is 61.
- TV presenter-model Daisy Fuentes is 58.
- R&B singer Ronnie DeVoe (New Edition; Bell Biv DeVoe) is 57.
- Actor Rachel McAdams is 46.