TODAY IN CRIME: October 26

1881 Wyatt Earp, his two brothers, and "Doc" Holliday confronted Ike Clanton's gang in a gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Ariz. Three members of Clanton's gang were killed; Earp's brothers were wounded.

1892 Ida B. Wells published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. In 2020 the Pulitzer Prize Board awarded Wells a special citation "[f]or her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching."

1909 Korean nationalist and independence activist An Jung-geun assassinated Itō Hirobumi, President of the Privy Council of Japan, who forced the Emperor of Korea to sign the Eulsa Treaty, an agreement that stripped Korea of its diplomatic sovereignty and placed all Korean affairs under Imperial Japanese control. After six trials, An was hanged.

1956 During the Hungarian Revolution, Hungarian secret police forces massacred more than 100 students, workers, and townspeople of the town of Mosonmagyaróvár who had gathered to peacefully demonstrate against Soviet occupation. Fighting spread throughout the country.

1970 In Atlanta, Muhammad Ali faced off against Jerry Quarry in his first boxing match after a three-year hiatus, still awaiting the appeal of his conviction for draft evasion. He knocked out Quarry in the third round. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1971.

1979 Kim Jae-kyu, the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, shot and killed South Korean President Park Chung-hee at a KCIA safe house in Seoul after a banquet. Kim and his associates also killed four bodyguards and a presidential chauffeur before being captured, tortured, and executed. It is still unclear whether the attack was unplanned and impulsive or deliberate and premeditated, whether Kim was motivated by jealousy of Park's chief bodyguard, a loyalist who had gained too much favor with the dictator, whether Kim was attempting to seize power himself or to restore democracy with the help of the American CIA, or suffering temporary insanity due to hepatic encephalopathy.

1991 Former Washington Mayor Marion Barry arrived at the Federal Correctional Complex in Petersburg, VA, to begin serving a six-month sentence for cocaine possession. He was released in April 1992 and went on to win re-election in 1994.

1993 A Washington, D.C., circuit court convicted Deborah Gore Dean, a central figure in the Reagan-era HUD scandal, of twelve felony counts of defrauding the U.S. government and lying to the U.S. Congress.

1995 Mossad agents assassinated Fathi Shaqaqi, co-founder and Secretary-General of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, in his hotel in Malta, a stopover on his way home to Damascus after securing the promise of funding from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The assassination and a crackdown by Israel and the Palestinian National Authority left the PIJ considerably weakened.

1995 A Texas jury sentenced Yolanda Saldivar to life in prison for the murder of popular singer Selena, her former employer. Saldivar shot and killed the “Queen of Tejano music” March 31, 1995, after being fired for embezzlement.

1996 Federal prosecutors cleared security guard Richard Jewell as a suspect in the Olympic park bombing. Because leaks in the investigation lead to his being identified as a suspect, Jewell filed defamation suits against the FBI, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ABC, NBC, CNN, the New York Post, two radio stations, and Piedmont College. He reached monetary settlements with most.

1998 The Recording Industry Association of America lost its case against the sale of MP3 players when a U.S. federal judge refused to issue an injunction against the devices. MP3 players are used to play music downloaded from the Internet.

1999 Britain's House of Lords voted to end the right of hereditary peers to vote in Britain's upper chamber of Parliament.

2000 A wave of protests in the Ivory Coast forced Robert Guéï to step down as president after the presidential election. He fled the country while the duly elected Laurent Gbagbo took office. Gbagbo in turn refused to step down after his defeat in the presidential election ten years later.

2001 U.S. President George W. Bush signed the USA Patriot Act into law, giving authorities unprecedented ability to search, seize, detain, or eavesdrop in their pursuit of possible terrorists.

2002 A three-day hostage siege by Chechen rebels at a Moscow theater ended when Russian special forces pumped a knockout gas into the building, killing 129 of the 800-plus captives. All 50 hostage-takers were killed by the gas or gunshot wounds.