HIGHLIGHTS IN HISTORY
Today’s highlight:
On August 25, 1944, during World War II, Paris was liberated by Allied forces after four years of Nazi occupation.
On this date:
1718: some settling Hundreds in present-day of French colonists New Orleans. arrived in Louisiana, with
1875: swim across Capt. the Matthew English Webb Channel, became getting the from first Dover, person England, to to Calais, France, in 22 hours.
1916: the National President Park Woodrow Service within Wilson the Department signed an act of establishing the Interior. 1921: signed a The peace United treaty States with Germany.
1928: Richard An E. expedition Byrd set sail led by from Hoboken, N.J., on its journey to Antarctica.
1967: George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, was shot to death in the parking lot of a shopping center in Arlington, Virginia; former party member John Patler was later convicted of the killing.
1981: The U.S. spacecraft Voyager 2 came within 63,000 miles of Saturn’s cloud cover, sending back pictures of and data about the ringed planet.
1985: Samantha Smith, 13, the schoolgirl whose letter to Yuri V. Andropov resulted in her famous peace tour of the Soviet Union, died with her father in an airliner crash in Auburn, Maine.
1993: Amy Biehl, a 26-year-old Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach, California, was slain by a mob near Cape Town, South Africa. The four men convicted in Biehl’s death claimed the attack was part of the war on apartheid; they were granted amnesty after confessing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
2001: Rhythm-and-blues singer Aaliyah was killed with eight others in a plane crash in the Bahamas; she was 22.
2009: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy died at age 77 in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, after a battle with a brain tumor.
Ten years ago: Democrats opened their national convention in Denver, where they prepared to nominate Barack Obama for president; in the first major address of the gathering, Michelle Obama declared, “I love this country” as she described herself as a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother, no different from many women. Israel freed nearly 200 jailed Palestinians in a goodwill gesture hours before U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began her peace mission to the region.
Five years ago: Syria agreed to a U.N. investigation into an alleged chemical weapons attack outside Damascus — a deal a senior White House official dismissed as “too late to be credible,” saying the United States had “very little doubt” President Bashar Assad’s forces used such weapons.
One year ago: Hurricane Harvey, the fiercest hurricane to hit the U.S. in more than a decade, made landfall near Corpus Christi, Texas, with 130 mph sustained winds; the storm would deliver five days of rain totaling close to 52 inches. The hurricane left at least 68 people dead and caused an estimated $125 billion in damage in Texas. President Donald Trump pardoned former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of a misdemeanor contempt-of-court charge for defying a judge’s orders that he stop conducting immigration patrols; the 85-year-old retired lawman had faced the prospect of jail time at his sentencing in October.