On this date in history:

In 1891, the game of basketball was invented when James Naismith, a physical education teacher at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., put peach baskets at the opposite ends of a gym and gave students soccer balls to toss into them.

In 1903, the world's first drive-in gasoline station opened for business in Pittsburgh.

In 1943, ending a Big Three meeting in Tehran, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Russian Premier Josef Stalin pledged a concerted effort to defeat Nazi Germany.

In 1950, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, in a cable to United Press, said that his U.N. forces were fighting in Korea against military odds without precedent in history, and warned that failure to meet the issue there will leave it to be fought, and possibly lost, on the battlefields of Europe.

In 1953, the first Playboy magazine was published. Marilyn Monroe was on the cover. The magazine temporarily ended the practice of including nudity in its pages in 2016, but reintroduced it one year later.

In 1955, Rosa Parks, a Black woman, was arrested in Montgomery, Ala., for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus, signaling, along with its resulting bus boycott and related events, the birth of the modern civil rights movement.

In 1959, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a treaty banning military activity on Antarctica, reserving the continent for scientific research.

In 1990, workers broke through in the tunnel under the English Channel for the first time. The Chunnel connecting Britain and France opened four years later.

In 2005, same-sex marriage became legal in South Africa when the country's Constitutional Court ruled that laws banning it were unconstitutional.

In 2011, Iceland became the first Western European country to recognize a Palestinian sovereign state.

In 2016, Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn was formally proclaimed King Maha X of Thailand, the country's first new monarch in seven decades.

In 2017, Michael Flynn, former national security adviser in the Trump administration, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russia's alleged election meddling. President Donald Trump pardoned him in November 2020.

In 2021, rising inflation related to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed Tel Aviv, Israel, to the top of the list of the most expensive cities to live in in the world.

Copyright 2024 by United Press International