On this date in history:

In 1891, the game of basketball was invented when James Naismith, a physical education teacher at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., put peach baskets at the opposite ends of a gym and gave students soccer balls to toss into them.

In 1903, the world's first drive-in gasoline station opened for business in Pittsburgh.

In 1917, the Rev. Edward Flanagan founded Boys Town near Omaha.

In 1943, ending a Big Three meeting in Tehran, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Russian Premier Josef Stalin pledged a concerted effort to defeat Nazi Germany.

In 1950, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, in a cable to United Press, said that his U.N. forces were fighting in Korea against military odds without precedent in history, and warned that failure to meet the issue there will leave it to be fought, and possibly lost, on the battlefields of Europe.

In 1953, the first Playboy magazine was published. Marilyn Monroe was on the cover.

In 1955, Rosa Parks, a black woman, was arrested in Montgomery, Ala., for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus, signaling, along with its resulting bus boycott and related events, the birth of the modern civil rights movement.

In 1988, Benazir Bhutto was appointed prime minister of Pakistan, a post she held until August 1990, and again from October 1993 to November 1996.

In 1990, workers broke through in the tunnel under the English Channel for the first time. The Chunnel connecting Britain and France opened four years later.

In 2005, same-sex marriage became legal in South Africa when the country's Constitutional Court ruled that laws banning it were unconstitutional.

In 2008, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama introduced Hillary Clinton, his chief rival in the Democratic presidential race, as his choice for secretary of state.

In 2011, Iceland became the first Western European country to recognize a Palestinian sovereign state.

In 2012, police said Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher killed himself at the team's practice facility after killing his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins.

In 2012, Enrique Pena Nieto, 46, was sworn in as president of Mexico.

In 2013, a Metro-North commuter train derailed along the Hudson River in New York City's Bronx borough, killing four people and injuring 67. Officials said the train was going 82 mph as it reached a curve with a speed limit of 30 mph.

In 2016, Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn was formally proclaimed King Maha X of Thailand, the country's first new monarch in seven decades.

In 2016, former New York Jets running back Joe McKnight was fatally shot in a road-rage incident outside of New Orleans.

Copyright 2017 by United Press International