TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY IS TUESDAY, JULY 25, the 206th day of 2017. There are 159 days left in the year. TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT IN HISTORY: On this date in 1967, a full-page ad in The Times (of London) called for the legalization of marijuana, saying the law against the drug was “immoral in principle and unworkable in practice”; among the signatories were all four of the Beatles, one of whom, Paul McCartney, paid for the ad.
In 1593, France’s King Henry IV converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism.
In 1866, Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army of the United States, the first officer to hold the rank.
In 1934, Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was assassinated by pro-Nazi Austrians in a failed coup attempt. In 1946, the United States detonated an atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device.
In 1952, Puerto Rico became a selfgoverning commonwealth of the United States. 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 1984, Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space as she carried out more than three hours of experiments outside the orbiting space station Salyut 7. 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 crash of the supersonic jet.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS: Actress Barbara Harris is 82. Folk-pop singermusician Bruce Woodley (The Seekers) is 75. Rock musician Jim McCarty (The Yardbirds) is 74. Rock musician Verdine White (Earth, Wind & Fire) is 66. Singer-musician Jem Finer (The Pogues) and model-actress Iman are 62. Celebrity chef/TV personality Geoffrey Zakarian is 58. Actress Illeana Douglas is 52. Actor Matt LeBlanc is 50. Rock musician Paavo Lotjonen (Apocalyptica) is 49. Actor D.B. Woodside is 48. Actor Jay R. Ferguson is 43. Actor Michael Welch is 30. Actress Linsey Godfrey is 29. Classical singer Faryl Smith is 22. Actress Meg Donnelly (TV: “American Housewife”) is 16. Actor Pierce Gagnon is 12.