TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Monday, July 29, the 210th day of 2019. There are 155 days left in the year.

On this date in: 1914:

Transcontinental telephone service in the U.S. became operational with the first test conversation between New York and San Francisco. 1921:

Adolf Hitler became the leader (“fuehrer”) of the National Socialist German Workers Party. 1958:

President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA. 1965:

The Beatles’ second feature film, “Help!,” had its world premiere in London. 1967:

An accidental rocket launch on the deck of the supercarrier USS Forrestal in the Gulf of Tonkin resulted in a fire and explosions that killed 134 servicemen. (Among the survivors was future Arizona senator John McCain, a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander who narrowly escaped with his life.) 1968:

Pope Paul the Sixth reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s stance against artificial methods of birth control. 1975:

President Gerald R. Ford became the first U.S. president to visit the site of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland. 1980:

A state funeral was held in Cairo, Egypt, for the deposed Shah of Iran, who had died two days earlier at age 60. 1981:

Britain’s Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in a glittering ceremony at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. (The couple divorced in 1996.) 1994:

Abortion opponent Paul Hill shot and killed Dr. John Bayard Britton and Britton’s bodyguard, James H. Barrett, outside the Ladies Center clinic in Pensacola, Florida. (Hill was executed in Sept. 2003.) 1997:

Members of Congress from both parties embraced compromise legislation designed to balance the budget while cutting taxes. 2004:

Sen. John Kerry accepted the Democratic presidential nomination at the party’s convention in Boston. 2017:

U.S. and South Korean forces conducted joint live-fire exercises in response to North Korea’s second launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile; experts said the North Korean launch showed that a large portion of the United States was now within range of North Korea’s arsenal.