16-04-2025
Today in History: April 16, the Virginia Tech shooting
In 1928, tens of thousands of mill workers went on strike in New Bedford over a 10 percent cut in pay. The strike would last six months.
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In 1945, a Soviet submarine in the Baltic Sea torpedoed the ship Goya, which Germany was using to transport civilian refugees and wounded soldiers. As many as 7,000 people died as the ship broke apart and sank minutes after being struck.
In 1947, the French cargo ship Grandcamp, carrying over 2,000 tons of ammonium nitrate, blew up in the harbor in Texas City, Texas. A nearby ship, the High Flyer, which was carrying ammonium nitrate and sulfur, caught fire and exploded the following day. The combined blasts and fires killed nearly 600 people and injured 5,000 in the worst industrial accident in US history.
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In 1952, state lawmaker Thomas P. 'Tip'' O'Neill announced he would run for the US House seat from Cambridge being vacated by John F. Kennedy, who was running for Senate. O'Neill would spend the next four decades in Congress, with the last ten years as speaker of the House.
In 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his 'Letter from Birmingham Jail,' in which the civil rights activist responded to a group of local clergymen who had criticized him for leading street protests. King defended his tactics, writing, 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'
In 1972, Apollo 16 blasted off for the moon with astronauts John Young, Charles Duke, and Ken Mattingly on board.
In 2007, Seung-hui Cho, a 23-year-old Virginia Tech student, killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus before taking his own life. It remains the deadliest school history in US history.
In 2010, the US government accused Wall Street's most powerful firm of fraud, saying Goldman Sachs & Co. had sold mortgage investments without telling buyers the securities were crafted with input from a client who was betting on them to fail. (In July 2010, Goldman agreed to pay $550 million in a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but it did not admit wrongdoing.)
In 2012, a trial began in Oslo, Norway, for Anders Breivik, charged with killing 77 people in a bomb and gun rampage in July 2011. (Breivik was found guilty of terrorism and premeditated murder and given a 21-year prison sentence.)
