HISTORY AT A GLANCE

TODAY is Monday, August 7, the 219th day of 2017. There are 146 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date: 1955 – Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, the precursor

to Sony, sells its first transistor radios in Japan. 1959 – Explorer program: Explorer 6 launches from the

Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral, Florida. 1960 – Ivory Coast becomes independent from France. 1962 – Canadian-born American pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey awarded the U.S. President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service for her refusal to authorize thalidomide. 1964 – Vietnam War: The US Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving US President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces. 1966 – Race riots occur in Lansing, Michigan. 1970 – California judge Harold Haley is taken hostage in his courtroom and killed during an effort to free George Jackson from police custody. 1974 – Philippe Petit performs a high wire act between the twin towers of the World Trade Center 1,368 feet (417 m) in the air. 1976 – Viking program: Viking 2 enters orbit around Mars. 1978 – US President Jimmy Carter declares a federal emergency at Love Canal due to toxic waste that had been disposed of negligently. 1979 – Several tornadoes strike the city of Woodstock,

Ontario, Canada and the surrounding communities. 1985 – Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri and Chiaki Mukai are

chosen to be Japan’s first astronauts. 1985 – The White House Farm murders took place near the

English village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy, Essex, England. 1987 – Lynne Cox becomes first person to swim from the United States to the Soviet Union, crossing from Little Diomede Island in Alaska to Big Diomede in the Soviet Union 1998 – The United States embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya kill approximately 212 people. 1999 – The Chechnya-based Islamic International Brigade

invades neighboring Dagestan. 2008 – The start of the Russo-Georgian War over the territory

of South Ossetia. 2012 – Three gunmen kill 19 people in a church near Okene,

Nigeria. 2013 – A bombing in a market in Karachi, Pakistan, kills

eleven people.