Today in History: June 12, 49 people killed in Pulse nightclub shooting

Today is Friday, June 12, the 163rd day of 2026. There are 202 days left in the year. Today in history: On June 12, 2016, a gunman opened fire at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, leaving 49 people dead and 53 wounded in what was then the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history; the gunman, Omar Mateen, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group during a three-hour standoff before being killed in a shootout with police.Also on this date: In 1939, the Baseball Hall of Fame was dedicated in Cooperstown, New York.In 1942, Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday, less than a month before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis. In 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2001.) In 1964, eight South African anti-apartheid activists, including Nelson Mandela, were sentenced to life in prison for committing acts of sabotage against South Africa's apartheid government.In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages, ruling that such laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Popular ReadsIn 1978, David Berkowitz was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for each of the six “Son of Sam” killings committed in New York City over the previous two years.In 1987, President Ronald Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”In 1991, Russians went to the polls for their first-ever presidential election, which resulted in victory for Boris Yeltsin.In 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found dead outside Simpson’s Los Angeles home. (O.J. Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson’s ex-husband, was later acquitted of the killings in a criminal trial but was eventually held liable in a civil action.) In 2018, President Donald Trump met with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, marking the first time a sitting U.S. president had met with a North Korean leader. The two would meet again twice in 2019. In 2025, an Air India plane bound for London crashed in a residential area of Ahmedabad shortly after takeoff, killing 241 people on board and 19 on the ground. One passenger who was thrown from the plane survived.Today’s Birthdays: Actor Sonia Manzano is 76. Actor-director Timothy Busfield is 69. Olympic track gold medalist Gwen Torrence is 61. Actor Rick Hoffman is 56. Actor-comedian Finesse Mitchell is 54. Actor Jason Mewes is 52. Blues musician Kenny Wayne Shepherd is 49. Actor Timothy Simons is 48. Singer-songwriter Robyn is 47. Model Adriana Lima is 45. Actor Dave Franco is 41. Country musician Chris Young is 41. Country singer Ashley Cooke is 29.

Raccontata daabcnews.com