Today in History
Today’s highlight:
On July 15, 1976, a 36-hour kidnap ordeal began for 26 schoolchildren and their bus driver as they were abducted near Chowchilla, California, by three gunmen and imprisoned in an underground cell. The captives escaped unharmed; the kidnappers were caught.
On this date:
1799: French soldiers in Egypt discovered the Rosetta Stone, which proved instrumental in deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. 1834: The Spanish Inquisition was abolished more than 3 1/2 centuries after its creation.
1870: Georgia became the last Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union. Manitoba entered confederation as the fifth Canadian province.
1910: The term “Alzheimer’s disease” was used to describe a progressive form of presenile dementia in the book “Clinical Psychiatry” by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who credited the work of his colleague, Alois Alzheimer, in identifying the condition.
1971: President Richard Nixon delivered a televised address in which he announced that he had accepted an invitation to visit the People’s Republic of China.
1983: Eight people were killed when a suitcase bomb planted by Armenian extremists exploded at the Turkish Airlines counter at Orly Airport in Paris.
1985: A visibly gaunt Rock Hudson appeared at a news conference with actress Doris Day. It was later revealed Hudson was suffering from AIDS.
1996: MSNBC, a 24-hour all-news network, made its debut on cable and the Internet.
1997: Fashion designer Gianni Versace, 50, was shot dead outside his Miami Beach home; suspected gunman Andrew Phillip Cunanan, 27, was found dead eight days later, a suicide. Investigators believed Cunanan killed four other people before Versace in a cross-country spree that began the previous March.
2002: John Walker Lindh, an American who’d fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, pleaded guilty in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, to two felonies in a deal sparing him life in prison.
2008: In an All-star game that began at dusk and ended at 1:37 a.m. the next morning, the American League defeated the National League 4-3 in 15 innings at Yankee Stadium.
2010: After 85 days, BP stopped the flow of oil from a blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico using a 75-ton cap lowered onto the wellhead earlier in the week.
Ten years ago: A Russian-made Iranian jetliner carrying 168 people crashed after taking off from Tehran, killing everyone aboard.
Five years ago: Israel resumed heavy bombing of Gaza after the Islamic militant group Hamas rejected an Egyptian truce plan and instead unleashed more rocket barrages at the Jewish state.
One year ago: President Donald Trump arrived in Finland for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Earlier, in an interview with CBS News, Trump named the European Union as a top adversary of the United States.