Blast from the Past

Today is June 20.

A landmark settlement was announced on this date in 1997. Four major U.S. tobacco companies and several state attorneys general, after months of negotiations, agreed to a $368.5 billion settlement to recover the costs of smoking-related illnesses.

It was on this date in 1898 during the Spanish-American War that the U.S. Navy seized Guam, the largest of the Mariana Islands in the Pacific. Actually, it wasn't all that tough: the Spanish commander of Guam, unaware until then that there was a war going on and having no ammunition, surrendered. The people of Guam were granted U.S. citizenship in 1950.

The United States and the Soviet Union agreed on this date in 1963 to establish a hot line communications link between Washington, D.C., and Moscow.

And O.J. Simpson pleaded "100 percent not guilty" to charges he murdered his ex-wife and her friend on this date in 1994. Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman had been stabbed and slashed to death outside her Los Angeles condo a week earlier. O.J. would later be acquitted in a highly publicized criminal trial.