On October 13, 1775, the United States Navy had its origins as the Continental Congress ordered the construction of a naval fleet.

Ten years ago

British playwright Harold Pinter won the 2005 Nobel Prize in literature. Scores of Islamic militants launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings in Nalchik, a city in Russia’s turbulent Caucasus region, leaving 139 people dead, most of them insurgents.

Five years ago

Rescuers in Chile using a missile-like escape capsule pulled 33 men one by one to fresh air and freedom 69 days after they were trapped in a collapsed mine a halfmile underground. U.S. authorities announced the arrests of 73 people accused of being part of a vast network of Armenian gangsters and their associates who allegedly used phantom health care clinics and other means to try to cheat Medicare out of $163 million.

One year ago

President Barack Obama huddled with some of his senior national security aides and with top administration health officials for the latest assessment on the government’s response to Ebola in the aftermath of a Dallas nurse’s contracting the disease. Frenchman Jean Tirole was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in economics for showing how to encourage better products and competitive prices in industries dominated by a few companies.

— By The Associated Press