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A daily look at some of The News & Observer headlines on this date in past years.
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On this day in 2015, a prison inmate serving an incredible 160 years for burglary made a last request to North Carolina, expecting to die behind bars:
Send me back to Canada.
Derek Twyman had burglarized a string of country club homes in Greensboro, earning his colossal sentence. But he wasn’t a US citizen, let alone a Tar Heel, and he begged the state to let him age in his home country after decades behind NC bars.
“They tell me I’ll be 105 when I get out,” he told The N&O. “I might as well die in my own country.”
Three years later, the state let Twyman go for good. And he left for Toronto.
Henry Frye became chief justice of the NC Supreme Court, first Black jurist to hold that post.
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Frye, who had been an associate justice since 1983, had been denied the right to vote in the state four decades earlier due to his race.
Gov. Jim Hunt praised Frye’s “sharp, quick mind.”
In 1926, a group of Duke University biologists pored over ”learned volumes of anatomical lore” while pondering the scientific implications of a puppy born without a tail.
The tailless rat terrier, who belonged to a university dean, might have been a physical abnormality or the result of slow evolution.
Other than the nub on its hind portions, the pup was “perfectly normal in other respects.”
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