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more events on February 8
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1990
CBS television temporarily suspends Andy Rooney for his anti-gay and anti-black remarks in a magazine interview.
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1971
South Vietnamese ground forces, backed by American air power, begin Operation Lam Son 719, a 17,000 man incursion into Laos that ends three weeks later in a disaster.
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1965
South Vietnamese bomb the North Vietnamese communications center at Vinh Linh.
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1962
The U.S. Defense Department reports the creation of the Military Assistance Command in South Vietnam.
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1952
Elizabeth becomes Queen of England after her father, King George VI, dies.
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1943
British General Orde Wingate leads a guerrilla force of “Chindits” against the Japanese in Burma.
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1942
The Japanese land on Singapore.
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1940
Ted Koppel, television journalist.
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1931
James Dean, film actor and 1950s teenage icon (Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, Giant).
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1926
Neal Cassaday, writer, counterculture proponent.
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1924
The gas chamber is used for the first time to execute a murderer.
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1911
Elizabeth Bishop, poet.
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1910
The Boy Scouts of America is incorporated.
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1906
Henry Roth, writer (Call it Sleep).
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Chester F. Carlson, physicist, inventor of xerography, the electrostatic dry-copy process.