Today is Friday, Sept. 29th, the 272nd day of 2017 with 93 to follow.
The moon is waxing. Morning stars are Mars and Venus. Evening stars are Jupiter and Saturn.
Those born on this date are under the sign of Libra. They include Spanish poet-novelist Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, in 1547; Italian artist Caravaggio in 1571; pioneer nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi in 1901; singing movie cowboy Gene Autry in 1907; film director Michelangelo Antonioni in 1912; British writer Colin Dexter in 1930; actor Anita Ekberg in 1931; rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis in 1935 (age 82); former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in 1936 (age 81); actor Madeline Kahn in 1942; actor Ian McShane in 1942 (age 75); Polish leader/Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Walesa in 1943 (age 74); composer Mike Post in 1944 (age 73); TV personality Bryant Gumbel in 1948 (age 69); rock guitarist Mark Farner in 1948 (age 69); Olympic gold medal-winning runner Sebastian Coe in 1956 (age 61); comedian Andrew Dice Clay in 1957 (age 60); former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 1961 (age 56); actor Chrissy Metz in 1979 (age 38); actor Zachary Levi in 1980 (age 37); musician Dallas Green in 1980 (age 37); NBA player Kevin Durant in 1988 (age 29).
On this date in history:
In 1789, the U.S. War Department organized the country’s first standing army — 700 soldiers who would serve for three years.
In 1923, Britain began to govern Palestine under a League of Nations mandate.
In 1936, in the U.S. presidential race between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alf Landon, the Democratic and Republican parties used radio for the first time.
In 1941, the Babi Yar massacre of nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women and children began on the outskirts of Kiev in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.
In 1965, Communist North Vietnam announced that U.S. pilots taken prisoner would be tried as war criminals.
In 1988, Stacy Marie Allison, a construction worker from Portland, Ore., became the first American woman and the world’s seventh to scale Mount Everest.
In 1992, Earvin “Magic” Johnson announced he was returning to the Los Angeles Lakers less than a year after he retired because he had the AIDS virus. A month later, Johnson announced his retirement for a second time.
In 2005, John Roberts Jr. easily won confirmation by the U.S. Senate and was sworn in as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He succeeded the late William Rehnquist.
In 2006, U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., resigned in the wake of revelations he sent inappropriate email messages to an underage former Capitol Hill page.
In 2008, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped almost 778 points, its biggest one-day point decline.
In 2011, a special court in India convicted 269 police officers and others for their roles in a 1992 raid on a small village that resulted in multiple rapes and beatings.
In 2014, Ashraf Ghani was sworn in as president of Afghanistan, succeeding Hamid Karzai.
A thought for the day: British statesman Edmund Burke said, “Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.”
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