Also on this date
Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa was assassinated by gunmen in Parral.
In 1923,
In 1944,
an attempt by a group of German officials to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a bomb failed as the explosion only wounded the Nazi leader.
In 1951,
Jordan’s King Abdullah I was assassinated in Jerusalem by a Palestinian gunman who was shot dead on the spot by security.
In 1960,
a pair of Polaris missiles were fired from the submerged USS George Washington off Cape Canaveral, Fla., at a target more than 1,100 miles away.
In 1968,
the first International Special Olympics Summer Games, organized by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, were held at Soldier Field in Chicago.
In 1976,
America’s Viking 1 robot spacecraft made a successful, firstever landing on Mars.
In 1977,
a flash flood hit Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing more than 80 people and causing $350 million worth of damage.
In 1993,
White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster Jr., 48, was found shot to death in a park near Washington, D.C.; his death was ruled a suicide.
In 2007,
President George W. Bush signed an executive order prohibiting cruel and inhuman treatment (humiliation or denigration of religious beliefs) in the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects.
In 2012,
Gunman James Holmes opened fire inside a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, during a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises,” killing 12 people and wounding 70 others. (Holmes was convicted of murder and attempted murder, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.)
Actress Lindsay Lohan began a 14-day jail sentence – reduced from 90 due to overcrowding – for violating probation in 2007 drug case.
The United States and Cuba restored full diplomatic relations after more than five decades of frosty relations rooted in the Cold War.
America marked the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing; Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, showed Vice President Mike Pence the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center where the flight began.
A ssociated Press