On This Day in History

Lee Petty won the first edition of the Daytona 500, a NASCAR auto race at the Daytona International Speedway (pictured) in Florida.

Samuel Byck attempted to hijack an aircraft at Baltimore/Washington International Airport with the intention of crashing it into the White House to assassinate U.S. president Richard Nixon, but he was stopped by police.

At the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, the United States ice hockey team defeated the Soviet team in an unlikely victory that became known as the Miracle on Ice.

The play Moose Murders opened and closed on the same night at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, becoming the standard of "awfulness" against which all Broadway failures are judged.

Scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland announced the existence of Dolly, a female sheep who was the first mammal to have successfully been cloned from an adult cell.

The cherry-throated tanager, a critically endangered bird which had not been definitively sighted in over a century, was rediscovered in Conceição do Castelo, Brazil.

Seven men staged the largest cash robbery in Britain at a Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent, United Kingdom.

An earthquake registering 6.3 ML struck Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 185 people and causing around NZ$40 billion in damage.

Bahraini uprising: Tens of thousands of people marched in protest in Manama against the deaths of seven people killed by police and army forces during previous protests.

A train failed to apply its brakes and crashed through a buffer stop at Once railway station in Buenos Aires, resulting in 51 deaths and more than 700 injuries.

A group broke into the North Korean embassy in Madrid, Spain, and stole several mobile telephones and digital storage devices.