diesa_j | Today in History

Today is Saturday, Nov. 29, the 334th day of 2008. There are 32 days left in the year.

On Nov. 29, 1963, President Johnson named a commission headed by Earl Warren to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy.

On this date:

In 1530, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, onetime adviser to England's King Henry VIII, died.

In 1864, a Colorado militia killed at least 150 peaceful Cheyenne Indians in the Sand Creek Massacre.

In 1908, New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was born in New Haven, Conn.

In 1924, Italian composer Giacomo Puccini died in Brussels, Belgium, before he could complete his opera "Turandot." (It was finished by Franco Alfano.)

In 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the partitioning of Palestine between Arabs and Jews.

In 1961, Enos the chimp was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., aboard the Mercury-Atlas 5 spacecraft, which orbited earth twice before returning.

In 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara announced he was leaving the Johnson administration to become president of the World Bank.

In 1981, actress Natalie Wood drowned in a boating accident off Santa Catalina Island, Calif., at age 43.

In 1986, actor Cary Grant died in Davenport, Iowa, at age 82.

In 2001, George Harrison, the "quiet Beatle," died in Los Angeles following a battle with cancer; he was 58.

Ten years ago: Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected legalizing heroin and other narcotics.

Five years ago: Gunmen in Iraq ambushed and killed two Japanese diplomats; seven members of Spain's military intelligence agency were killed in Mahmudiyah. Thirty-three people were killed in the crash of a military plane in Congo.

One year ago: A court in Sudan convicted British teacher Gillian Gibbons of insulting Islam for letting her students name a teddy bear "Muhammad" and sentenced her to 15 days in prison. (Gibbons was pardoned after spending more than a week in custody; she then left the country.) Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, embarked on a new, five-year term as a civilian president, a day after ceding the powerful post of army chief. Former Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde died in Chicago at age 83. Former General Motors chief executive Roger B. Smith died in Detroit at age 82.

Thought for Today: "Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable." — Mark Twain (1835-1910).