Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe Today is May 13 It was on this date in 1981 that Pope John Paul II was shot twice at close range while riding in an open automobile through St.Peter's Square in Rome. An escaped Turkish terrorist, Mehmet Ali Agca, was arrested immediately following the shooting and later convicted of attempted murder. The pope, who forgave his assailant, was pronounced recovered by his doctors in mid-August. Advertisement The sex abuse scandal involving Roman Catholic clergy grew violent on this date in 2002 when a Baltimore priest accused of molesting a youth years earlier was shot and wounded by the alleged victim. One day later, a Connecticut priest hanged himself at a Maryland treatment center for priests accused of molestation. Although the fighting had begun days earlier, it was on this date in 1846 that the United States declared war on Mexico. The struggle resulted in the U.S. annexation of land that would become parts of Oklahoma, New Mexico, Nevada, California, Utah and Colorado. The war ended in 1848. Eleven people, including four children, were killed on this date in 1985 in the fire that erupted after a Philadelphia police helicopter bombed the fortified house of a radical organization, MOVE, to end a 24-hour siege. The blaze also destroyed 53 homes. Advertisement It was on this date in 1991 that Winnie Mandela, the wife of South African anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela, was convicted of being an accessory in the assault of four youths who had been kidnapped and taken to her Soweto home in 1988. The Mandelas would later divorce. And Jamestown -- the first permanent English colony in North America -- was founded near the James River in Virginia on this date in 1607. Captains John Smith and Christopher Newport were among the leaders of the group, which had traveled from Plymouth, England, aboard three ships. We now return you to the present, already in progress.
