history at a glance

TODAY is Sunday August 6 the 218th day of the year. There are 147 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:

1926 – Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim across the English Channel. 1926 – In New York City, the Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone system premieres with the movie Don

Juan starring John Barrymore. 1930 – Judge Joseph Force Crater steps into a taxi in New York and disappears never to be

seen again. 1940 – Estonia was illegally annexed by the Soviet Union. 1942 – Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands becomes the first reigning queen to address a

joint session of the United States Congress. 1944 – The Warsaw Uprising occurs on August 1. It is brutally suppressed and all able-bodied men in Kraków are detained afterwards to prevent a similar uprising, the Kraków Uprising, that was planned but never carried out. 1945 – World War II: Hiroshima, Japan is devastated when the atomic bomb “Little Boy” is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay. Around 70,000 people are killed instantly, and some tens of thousands die in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning. 1960 – Cuban Revolution: Cuba nationalizes American and foreign-owned property in the

nation. 1962 – Jamaica becomes independent from the United Kingdom. 1964 – Prometheus, a bristlecone pine and the world’s oldest tree, is cut down. 1965 – US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. 1986 – A low-pressure system that redeveloped off the New South Wales coast dumps a record

328 millimeters (13 inches) of rain in a day on Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. 1988 – The Tompkins Square Park Riot in New York City spurs a reform of the NYPD, held

responsible for the event. 1990 – Gulf War: The United Nations Security Council orders a global trade embargo against

Iraq in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. 1991 – Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW

debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet. 1991 – Takako Doi, chair of the Social Democratic Party, becomes Japan’s first female speaker

of the House of Representatives. 1996 – NASA announces that the ALH 84001 meteorite, thought to originate from Mars,

contains evidence of primitive life-forms. 1997 – Korean Air Flight 801 crashed at Nimitz Hill, Guam killing 228 of 254 people on board. 2001 – Erwadi fire incident, 28 mentally ill persons tied to chain were burnt to death at a faith

based institution at Erwadi, Tamil Nadu. 2008 – A military junta led by Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz stages a coup d’état in Mauritania,

overthrowing president Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi. 2010 – Flash floods across a large part of Jammu and Kashmir, India, damages 71 towns and

kills at least 255 people. 2011 – A march in protest of the death of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, London, ends in a riot,

sparking off a wave of rioting throughout the country over the following four nights. 2011 – War in Afghanistan: A United States military helicopter is shot down, killing 30 American special forces members and a working dog, 7 Afghan soldiers, and 1 Afghan civilian. It was the deadliest single event for the United States in the War in Afghanistan. 2012 – NASA’s Curiosity rover lands on the surface of Mars. 2015 – A suicide bomb attack kills at least 15 people at a mosque in the south-western Saudi

city of Abha.