Ten years ago: British sailors and marines back home after being freed by Iran said they were blindfolded, isolated in cold stone cells and tricked into fearing execution while being coerced into falsely saying they had entered Iranian waters. A suicide bomber smashed a truck loaded with TNT and toxic chlorine gas into a police checkpoint in Ramadi, Iraq, killing 27 people.
Five years ago: Five black people were shot, three fatally, in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Jake England and Alvin Watts, who admitted targeting the victims because of race, pleaded guilty to murder, and were sentenced to life in prison without parole. A Navy F18 Hornet jet whose pilots were forced to eject crashed in a spectacular fireball into a big apartment complex in Virginia Beach, Virginia; miraculously, no one died. Fang Lizhi, 76, who was one of China’s best-known dissidents, died in Tucson, Arizona. Painter Thomas Kinkade, 54, died in Monte Sereno, California.
One year ago: A federal judge in Charleston, West Virginia, sentenced former coal executive Don Blankenship to a year in prison for his role in the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine explosion that killed 29 men in America’s deadliest mining disaster in four decades; Blankenship maintained that he had committed no crime. Country giant Merle Haggard died in Palo Cedro, California, on his 79th birthday.