HISTORY AT A GLANCE

TODAY is Monday, August 28, the 240th day of 2017. There are 125 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:

1931 – France and the Soviet Union sign a treaty of nonaggression. 1937 – Toyota Motors becomes an independent company.

1943 – World War II: In Denmark, a general strike against the

Nazi occupation starts. 1944 – World War II: Marseille and Toulon are liberated.

1953 – Nippon Television broadcasts Japan’s first television show, including its first TV advertisement.

1955 – Black teenager Emmett Till is brutally murdered in Mississippi, galvanizing the nascent Civil Rights Movement.

1957 – US Senator Strom Thurmond begins a filibuster to prevent the Senate from voting on Civil Rights Act of 1957; he stopped speaking 24 hours and 18 minutes later, the longest filibuster ever conducted by a single Senator.

1963 – March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. gives his I Have a Dream speech

1963 – Emily Hoffert and Janice Wylie are murdered in their Manhattan apartment, prompting the events that would lead to the passing of the Miranda Rights.

1963 – The Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, the longest floating bridge in the world, opens between Seattle and Medina, Washington, US.

1979 – An IRA bomb explodes at the Grote Markt in Brussels. 1988 – Ramstein air show disaster: Three aircraft of the Frecce Tricolori demonstration team collide and the wreckage falls into the crowd. Seventy-five are killed and 346 seriously injured.

1990 – Iraq declares Kuwait to be its newest province.

1990 – An F5 tornado strikes the Illinois cities of Plainfield and Joliet, killing 29 people.

1996 – Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales divorce. 1998 – Pakistan’s National Assembly passes a constitutional amendment to make the “Qur’an and Sunnah” the “supreme law” but the bill is defeated in the Senate.

1998 – Second Congo War: Loyalist troops backed by Angolan and Zimbabwean forces repulse the RCD and Rwandan offensive on Kinshasa.

2003 – An electricity blackout cuts off power to around 500,000 people living in south east England and brings 60% of London’s underground rail network to a halt.

2004 – Software Freedom Day is established and is firstly observed.