On this date in history:

In 1609, Galileo Galilei exhibited his first telescope in Venice.

In 1718, the city of New Orleans was founded.

In 1875, Matthew Webb, a 27-year-old British merchant navy captain, became the first person known to successfully swim the English Channel.

In 1967, a sniper assassinated American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell in Arlington, Va.

In 1985, Samantha Smith, 13, was killed with her father and six other people in a plane crash in Maine. Samantha's 1983 letter to Soviet President Yuri Andropov about her fear of nuclear war earned her a visit to the Soviet Union.

In 1992, researchers reported that cigarette smoking significantly boosts the risk of developing cataracts, a leading cause of blindness.

In 2006, Pulkova Airlines Flight 612 crashed near the Russian border in Ukraine, killing 171 people.

In 2008, two Afghan army commanders were fired after a U.S.-led coalition airstrike killed 89 civilians, many of them children. Afghan President Hamid Karzai blamed the casualties on a failure of coordination between coalition forces and the Afghan army.

In 2009, U.S. Sen. Edward Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., a liberal fixture in the Senate for 46 years, died of brain cancer at the age of 77.

In 2010, dozens of girls and teachers at a high school in Kabul, Afghanistan, were sickened by poison gas. Officials said the Taliban, who had been accused in eight similar attacks, sought to keep the girls from going to school.

In 2011, Mexican gunmen stormed a Monterrey casino and set it on fire, killing at least 57 people, mostly women.

In 2012, former astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, died in Cincinnati. He was 82.

In 2013, an offer by Syria to allow a U.N. investigation of an alleged chemical weapons attack near Damascus was dismissed by a senior U.S. official as too late to be credible. Anti-government groups in Syria said government forces used poisonous gas that killed at least 300 people.

In 2014, Tiger Woods announced that Sean Foley was no longer his coach. Woods said Foley ,who joined him in 2010 as his third coach as a pro, is one of the outstanding coaches in golf today. But Woods added that he wasn't going to compete for a few months and this is the right time to end our professional relationship.

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