HIGHLIGHTS IN HISTORY
Today’s highlight:
On July 17, 1944, during World War II, 320 men, two-thirds of them African-Americans, were killed when a pair of ammunition ships exploded at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California.
On this date:
1821: Spain ceded Florida to the United States.
1918: Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks.
1936: The Spanish Civil War began as right-wing army generals launched a coup attempt against the Second Spanish Republic.
1938: Aviator Douglas Corrigan took off from New York, saying he was headed for California; he ended up in Ireland, supposedly by accident, earning the nickname “Wrong Way Corrigan.”
1954: The two-day inaugural Newport Jazz Festival, billed as “The First American Jazz Festival,” opened in Rhode Island; among the performers the first night was Billie Holiday, who died in New York on this date in 1959 at age 44.
1955: Disneyland had its opening day in Anaheim, California.
1967: Jazz composer-musician John Coltrane died in Long Island, New York, at age 40.
1975: An Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower link-up of its kind.
1981: 114 people were killed when a pair of suspended walkways above the lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed during a tea dance.
1996: TWA Flight 800, a Europe-bound Boeing 747, exploded and crashed off Long Island, New York, shortly after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 230 people on board.
1997: Woolworth Corp. announced it was closing its 400 remaining five-and-dime stores across the country, ending 117 years in business.
2014: All 298 passengers and crew aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 were killed when the Boeing 777 was shot down over rebel-held eastern Ukraine.
Ten years ago: The FDA lifted its salmonella warning on tomatoes amid signs the record outbreak, while not over, might finally be slowing. President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki held a secure video conference during which they agreed to set a “general time horizon” for bringing more U.S. troops home from the Iraq war.
Five years ago: In a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing on domestic spying, members of Congress said they’d never intended to allow the National Security Agency to build a database of every phone call in America, while top Obama administration officials countered that the once-secret program was legal and necessary to keep America safe.
One year ago: The latest Republican effort to repeal and replace “Obamacare” was dealt a fatal blow in the Senate when two more Republican senators announced their opposition to the measure. A white former Texas police officer, Roy Oliver, was indicted on a murder charge in the April shooting death of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, who was in a car with four other black teens. Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was released from a federal prison in Minnesota where he had served a little over a year for a banking conviction related to a child-sex-abuse scandal.