TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY IS WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7, the 158th day of 2017. There are 207 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT IN HISTORY:
On this date in 1942, the Battle of Midway ended in a decisive victory for American naval forces over Imperial Japan, marking a turning point in the Pacific War.
In 1654, King Louis XIV, age 15, was crowned in Rheims, 11 years after the start of his reign.
In 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia offered a resolution to the Continental Congress stating “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”
In 1892, Homer Plessy, a “Creole of color,” was arrested for refusing to leave a whites-only car of the East Louisiana Railroad. (Ruling on his case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld “separate but equal” racial segregation, a concept it renounced in 1954.)
In 1929, the sovereign state of Vatican City came into existence as copies of the Lateran Treaty were exchanged in Rome.
In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, struck down, 7-2, a Connecticut law used to prosecute a Planned Parenthood clinic in New Haven for providing contraceptives to married couples. In 1981, Israeli military planes destroyed a nuclear power plant in Iraq, a facility the Israelis charged could have been used to make nuclear weapons.
In 1998, in a crime that shocked the nation, James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old black man, was hooked by a chain to a pickup truck and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas. (Two white men were later sentenced to death; one of them, Lawrence Russell Brewer, was executed in 2011. A third defendant received life with the possibility of parole.)
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Movie director James Ivory is 89. Actress Virginia McKenna is 86. Singer Tom Jones is 77. Former talk show host Jenny Jones is 71. Americana singer-songwriter Willie Nile is 69. Actress Anne Twomey is 66. Actor Liam Neeson is 65. Actress Colleen Camp and singer-songwriter Johnny Clegg are 64. Author Louise Erdrich is 63. Actor William Forsythe is 62. Vice President Mike Pence is 58. Rock singer-musician Gordon Gano (The Violent Femmes) is 54. Rock musician Eric Kretz (Stone Temple Pilots) is 51. Rock musician Dave Navarro is 50. Actress Helen Baxendale is 47. Actor Karl Urban is 45. TV personality Bear Grylls is 43. Rock musician Eric Johnson (The Shins) is 41. Actress Anna Torv is 38. Tennis player Anna Kournikova is 36. Actor Michael Cera is 29. Actress Shelley Buckner is 28. Rapper Iggy Azalea is 27. Rapper Fetty Wap is 26.