TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Wednesday, July 25, the 206th day of 2018.

TODAY'S HIGHLIGHT

On July 25, 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan’s King Hussein signed a declaration at the White House ending their countries’ 46-year-old formal state of war.

ON THIS DATE In 1866,

Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army of the United States, the first officer to hold the rank.

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 self-governing commonwealth of the United States.

In 1960,

a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, that had been the scene of a sit-in protest against its whites-only lunch counter dropped its segregation policy.

In 1972,

the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment came to light as The Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service, in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been allowing poor, rural black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even allowing them to die, as a way of studying the disease.

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 firstever crash of the supersonic jet.

In 2002,

Zacarias Moussaoui declared he was guilty of conspiracy in the September 11 attacks, then dramatically withdrew his plea at his arraignment in Alexandria, Va.

Ten years ago:

An oxygen tank exploded aboard a Qantas Boeing 747-400, ripping a hole in the fuselage and forcing an emergency landing in the Philippines. President George W. Bush signed an executive order expanding sanctions against individuals and organizations in Zimbabwe associated with the regime of President Robert Mugabe.

Five years ago:

Pope Francis, dubbed the “slum pope” for his work with the poor, received a rapturous welcome from one of Rio de Janeiro’s most violent shantytowns and demanded the world’s wealthy end the injustices that had left the poor on the margins of society.

One year ago:

A bitterly divided Senate voted to move forward with Republican legislation to repeal and replace “Obamacare. ”Sen. John McCain, returning to the Capitol for the first time since he was diagnosed with brain cancer, cast a decisive “yes” vote. (Three days later, McCain joined with two other Republican senators and Democrats in defeating the repeal effort.)

THOUGHT FOR TODAY

“Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.” — Sinclair Lewis, American author (1885-1951).