TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Wednesday, June 8.
Today’s highlight:
On June 8, 1864, Abra- ham Lincoln was nominated for another term as president during the National Union (Republican) Party’s convention in Baltimore.
On this date:
In A.D. 632, the prophet Muhammad died in Medina.
In 1867, modern Amer- ican architect Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin.
In 1953, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that restaurants in the District of Columbia could not refuse to serve Blacks. Eight tornadoes struck Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, killing 126 people.
In 1966, a merger was announced between the National and American Foot- ball Leagues, to take effect in 1970.
In 1967, during the six-day Middle East war, 34 American servicemen were killed when Israel attacked the USS Liberty, a Navy intelligence-gathering ship in the Mediterranean Sea. (Israel later said the Liberty had been mistaken for an Egyptian vessel.)
In 1968, authorities announced the capture in London of James Earl Ray, the suspected assassin of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1995, U.S. Marines rescued Capt. Scott O’grady, whose F-16C fighter jet had been shot down by Bosnian Serbs on June 2.
In 2008, the average price of regular gas crept up to $4 a gallon.
In 2009, North Korea’s highest court sentenced American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee to 12 years’ hard labor for trespassing and “hostile acts.” (The women were pardoned in early August 2009 after a trip to Pyongyang by former President Bill Clinton.)
In 2015, siding with the White House in a foreign-policy power struggle with Congress, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Americans born in the disputed city of Jerusalem could not list Israel as their birthplace on passports.
In 2020, thousands of mourners gathered at a church in Houston for a service for George Floyd, as his death during an arrest in Minneapolis continued to stoke protests in America and beyond over racial injustice.
Ten years ago: In Cairo, Egypt, a mob of hundreds of men assaulted women holding a march demanding an end to sexual harassment.
Five years ago: Former FBI Director James Comey, testifying before Congress, asserted that President Donald Trump fired him to interfere with his investigation of Russia’s ties to the Trump campaign.
One year ago: A bipartisan Senate report on the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol found a broad intellige nce breakdown across multiple agencies, along with widespread law enforcement and military failures; there were clear warnings and tips that rightwing extremist groups and other supporters of former President Donald Trump were planning to “storm the Capitol” with weapons and possibly infiltrate the tunnel system underneath it, but that intelligence never made it to top leaders. Ratko Mladic (RAHT’-KOH Mlah’-dich), the military chief known as the “Butcher of Bosnia” for orchestrating genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Balkan nation’s 1992-95 war, lost his final legal battle when U.N. judges affirmed his life sentence.