Today is the 206th day of 2023. There are 159 days left in the year.
On this date
In 1866, Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army of the United States, the first officer to hold the rank.
In 1946, the United States detonated an atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device.
In 1956, the Italian liner SS Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger ship Stockholm off the New England coast late at night and began sinking; 51 people — 46 from the Andrea Doria, five from the Stockholm — were killed. (The Andrea Doria capsized and sank the following morning.)
In 1960, a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina that had been the scene of a sit-in protest against its whites-only lunch counter dropped its segregation policy.
In 1972, the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment came to light as The Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service, in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been allowing poor, rural Black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even allowing them to die, as a way of studying the disease.
In 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the first “test tube baby,” was born in Oldham, England; she’d been conceived through the technique of in-vitro fertilization.
In 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan’s King Hussein signed a declaration at the White House ending their countries’ 46-year-old formal state of war.
In 2000, a New York-bound Air France Concorde crashed outside Paris shortly after takeoff, killing all 109 people on board and four people on the ground; it was the first-ever crash of the supersonic jet.
In 2010, the online whistleblower Wikileaks posted some 90,000 leaked U.S. military records that amounted to a blow-by-blow account of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.
In 2016, on the opening night of the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia, Bernie Sanders robustly embraced his former rival Hillary Clinton as a champion for the same economic causes that enlivened his supporters, signaling it was time for them to rally behind her in the campaign against Republican Donald Trump.
In 2019, President Donald Trump had a second phone call with the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during which he solicited Zelenskyy’s help in gathering potentially damaging information about former Vice President Joe Biden; that night, a staff member at the White House Office of Management and Budget signed a document that officially put military aid for Ukraine on hold.
Today’s Birthdays
Folk-pop singer-musician Bruce Woodley (The Seekers) is 81. Rock musician Jim McCarty (The Yardbirds) is 80. Rock musician Verdine White (Earth, Wind & Fire) is 72. Singer-musician Jem Finer (The Pogues) is 68. Model-actor Iman is 68. Cartoonist Ray Billingsley (“Curtis”) is 66. Rock musician Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) is 65. Celebrity chef/TV personality Geoffrey Zakarian is 64. Actor-singer Bobbie Eakes is 62. Actor Katherine Kelly Lang is 62. Actor Illeana Douglas is 58. Country singer Marty Brown is 58. Actor Matt LeBlanc is 56. Actor Wendy Raquel Robinson is 56. Rock musician Paavo Lötjönen (Apocalyptica) is 55. Actor D.B. Woodside is 54. Actor Miriam Shor is 52. Actor David Denman is 50. Actor Jay R. Ferguson is 49. Actor James Lafferty is 38. Actor Shantel VanSanten is 38. Actor Michael Welch is 36. Actor Linsey Godfrey is 35. Classical singer Faryl Smith is 28. Actor Mason Cook is 23. Actor Meg Donnelly (TV: “American Housewife”) is 22. Actor Pierce Gagnon is 18.
Associated Press
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Read More: Today in History: July 25, Concorde crashes near Paris, killing 109
