As we speak is Friday, Feb. 14, the forty fifth day of 2025. There are 320 days left within the 12 months. That is Valentine’s Day.
As we speak in historical past:
On Feb. 14, 2018, a gunman recognized as a former scholar opened hearth with a semi-automatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas Excessive College in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 individuals within the nation’s deadliest faculty capturing for the reason that Sandy Hook Elementary College assault in Newtown, Connecticut, greater than 5 years earlier. (Nikolas Cruz pleaded responsible to homicide in October 2021 and was sentenced in November 2022 to life in jail with out the potential of parole.)
Additionally on this date:
In 1779, English explorer James Cook dinner was killed on the island of Hawai’i throughout a melee following Cook dinner’s try to kidnap Hawaiian monarch Kalaniʻōpuʻu, who was for use as leverage for the return of a ship stolen from considered one of Cook dinner’s ships.
In 1876, inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Grey utilized individually for patents associated to the phone. (The U.S. Supreme Court docket finally dominated Bell the rightful inventor.)
In 1929, the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” befell in a Chicago storage as seven rivals of Al Capone’s gang had been gunned down.
In 1984, 6-year-old Stormie Jones turned the world’s first heart-liver transplant recipient when the surgical procedure was carried out at Youngsters’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.
In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, creator of “The Satanic Verses,” a novel the Ayatollah condemned as blasphemous towards Islam.
In 2013, double-amputee Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, at his residence in Pretoria, South Africa; he was later convicted of homicide and served almost 9 years of a sentence of 13 years and 5 months earlier than being launched from jail in January 2024.
In 2017, a former retailer clerk, Pedro Hernandez, was convicted in New York of homicide in one of many nation’s most haunting missing-child instances, almost 38 years after 6-year-old Etan Patz (AY’-tahn payts) disappeared whereas on the best way to a faculty bus cease.
As we speak’s birthdays:
Businessman-politician Michael Bloomberg is 83.
Saxophonist Maceo Parker is 82.
Journalist Carl Bernstein is 81.
Magician Teller (Penn and Teller) is 77.
Journalist-radio host Terry Gross is 74.
Actor Ken Wahl is 68.
Opera singer Renée Fleming is 66.
Actor Meg Tilly is 65.
Soccer Corridor of Famer Jim Kelly is 65.
Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, is 58.
Actor Simon Pegg is 55.
Rock singer Rob Thomas (Matchbox Twenty) is 53.
Former NFL quarterback Drew Bledsoe is 53.
Actor Danai Gurira is 47.
Actor Freddie Highmore is 33.
