Ten years ago: A magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck the steep hills of China’s southwestern Sichuan province, leaving nearly 200 people dead. Five snowboarders were killed in a backcountry avalanche on Colorado’s Loveland Pass. Search and rescue crews recovered the bodies several hours after the slide, which was about 600 feet wide and eight feet deep. It was among the deadliest U.S. avalanches in decades. Deanna Durbin, an actor who was among the biggest box office draws of Hollywood’s Golden Age, died on or around this date in a village outside Paris where she had lived out of public view for more than six decades. She was 91.
Five years ago: U.S. health officials told consumers to throw away any store-bought romaine lettuce and warned restaurants not to serve it amid an E. coli outbreak that had sickened more than 50 people in several states. Wells Fargo agreed to pay $1 billion to federal regulators to settle charges stemming from misconduct at its mortgage and auto lending businesses; it was the latest punishment levied against the banking giant for widespread customer abuses. The Democratic Party filed a lawsuit accusing the Donald Trump presidential campaign, Russia, WikiLeaks and Trump’s son and son-in-law of conspiring to undercut Democrats in the 2016 election by stealing tens of thousands of emails and documents.
One year ago: Russian forces tightened the noose around die-hard Ukrainian defenders holed up at a Mariupol steel plant amid desperate new efforts to open an evacuation corridor for trapped civilians in the ruined city, a key battleground in Moscow’s drive to seize the country’s industrial east. An unexpected drop in subscribers sent Netflix shares into freefall, forcing the company to consider experimenting with ads and cracking down on millions of freeloaders who use passwords shared by friends or family. New Mexico workplace safety regulators imposed the maximum possible fine against a film production company for firearms safety failures on the set where actor Alec Baldwin fatally shot a cinematographer.
