Ten years ago: United Nations humanitarian chief John Holmes appealed for more than $560 million to help 3 million victims of the earthquake in Haiti, calling it “a huge and a horrifying catastrophe.” Washington Wizards star Gilbert Arenas pleaded guilty to carrying a pistol without a license in the District of Columbia, a felony. (Arenas was later sentenced to a month in a halfway house and suspended until the end of the season by the NBA.)
Five years ago: In its first lethal injection since a botched one the previous spring, Oklahoma executed a convicted killer with a three-drug method. Police in Belgium conducted raids across the country, killing two suspected Islamist militants. Pope Francis arrived in the Philippines, Asia’s most populous Catholic nation, where ecstatic crowds awaited the first papal visit in 20 years.
One year ago: Musical comedy star Carol Channing — best known to Broadway audiences for her role in “Hello, Dolly!” — died in California at the age of 97. New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand entered the growing field of 2020 Democratic presidential contenders, telling “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on CBS that she was launching an exploratory committee. Extremists launched an attack on a luxury hotel complex in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi; the attack took the lives of 20 civilians, one police officer and five attackers from the group al-Shabab, based in neighboring Somalia. At a Senate confirmation hearing, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, William Barr, said he believed that Russia had tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and that the special counsel investigation was not a witch hunt.
