| Year | Event
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| 1869 | Charges of treason against Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, were dropped.
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| 1898 | A mysterious explosion on the battleship U.S.S. Maine in the Havana harbor occurred. Despite the fact that the cause of the explosion was unexplained and that Spain conceded to every U.S. demand except Cuban independence to avoid war, the explosion on the Maine was the cause of the U.S. declaration of war on Spain and the occupation of Cuba.
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| 1933 | President-elect Roosevelt (D) escaped an assassination attempt in Miami that claimed the life of Chicago Mayor Anton J. Cermak.
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| 1989 | The Soviet Union announced that the last of its troops had left Afghanistan, after more than nine years of military intervention.
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| 1990 | President George Bush (R) and the presidents of Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia signed an agreement in Cartagena pledging cooperation in the drug war. [All voluntary, of course.]
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| 2000 | On this day, according to the Justice Policy Institute, the U.S. [a.k.a., "The Land of the Free"] Prison and Jail population passed the 2,000,000 mark. "Our current rate of incarceration is six to 10 times that of most industrialized countries. We have more prisoners in one state, California, than do the nations of France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands combined.", according to the Institute. Per the DOJ, as of June 2006, the prison population had grown to 2,245,189, and the "Incarceration Rate" had grown in 10 years from 600 to 750 (per 100,000 citizens) . [I understand that Americans thrive on ideological beliefs and care not for facts, but the choice here seems to be that either we are a nation of law-breakers (and growing) or we live in a "Police State" (and growing).]
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| 2011 | Today's Example of a Most Interesting Government Purchase - From the Missile Defense Agency: "Indefinite-delivery/indefinite quantity contract to provide advisory and assistance services" to the U.S. military's Missile Defense Agency. For $281.7 million each to 4 firms.
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