This day in history
Today is Tuesday, July 25, the 206th day of 2023. There are 159 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Rock musician Verdine White (Earth, Wind & Fire) is 72. The Pogues singermusician Jem Finer is 68. Cartoonist Ray Billingsley is 66. Actor Illeana Douglas is 58. Actor Matt LeBlanc is 56. Actor Jay R. Ferguson is 49. Actor James Lafferty is 38. Actor Shantel VanSanten is 38. Classical singer Faryl Smith is 28. Actor Mason Cook is 23. Actor Meg Donnelly is 22. Actor Pierce Gagnon is 18.
▶ In 1722, the Three Years War, a series of battles between the New England colonies and the indigenous Wabanaki Confederacy, officially began as Massachusetts Bay Governor Samuel Shute declared war.
▶ In 1866, Ulysses S. Grant was named general of the Army of the United States, the first officer to hold the rank.
▶ In 1943, Benito Mussolini was dismissed as premier of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III, and placed under arrest. (He was later rescued by the Nazis and re-asserted his authority.)
▶ In 1946, the United States detonated an atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device.
▶ In 1956, the Italian liner SS Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger ship Stockholm off the New England coast late at night and began sinking; 51 people — 46 from the Andrea Doria, five from the Stockholm — were killed. (The Andrea Doria capsized and sank the following morning.)
▶ In 1960, a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, N.C., that had been the scene of a sit-in protest against its whites-only lunch counter dropped its segregation policy.
▶ In 1972, the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment came to light as the Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the US Public Health Service, in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been allowing poor, rural Black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even allowing them to die, as a way of studying the disease.
▶ In 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the first “test tube baby,” was born in Oldham, England; she’d been conceived through the technique of in-vitro fertilization.
▶ In 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan’s King Hussein signed a declaration at the White House ending their countries’ 46-year-old formal state of war.
▶ In 2000, a New York-bound Air France Concorde crashed outside Paris shortly after takeoff, killing all 109 people on board and four people on the ground; it was the first-ever crash of the supersonic jet.
▶ In 2010, the online whistleblower Wikileaks posted some 90,000 leaked US military records that amounted to a blow-by-blow account of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.
▶ In 2013, Pope Francis, dubbed the “slum pope” for his work with the poor, received a rapturous welcome from one of Rio de Janeiro’s most violent shantytowns and demanded the world’s wealthy end the injustices that had left the poor on the margins of society. The US attorney in New Jersey announced that four Russian nationals and a Ukrainian were charged with running a sophisticated hacking organization that over seven years penetrated computer networks of more than a dozen major American and international corporations, stealing and selling at least 160 million credit and debit card numbers, resulting in losses of hundreds of millions of dollars.
▶ In 2016, on the opening night of the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia, Bernie Sanders robustly embraced his former rival Hillary Clinton as a champion for the same economic causes that enlivened his supporters, signaling it was time for them to rally behind her in the campaign against Republican Donald Trump.
▶ In 2019, President Trump had a second phone call with the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, during which he solicited Zelensky’s help in gathering potentially damaging information about former vice president Joe Biden; that night, a staff member at the White House Office of Management and Budget signed a document that officially put military aid for Ukraine on hold.
▶ In 2020, federal agents fired tear gas to break up rowdy protests in Portland, Ore., that continued into the early morning. Demonstrations had been taking place in the city every night for two months in the aftermath of the Minneapolis death of George Floyd.
▶ Last year, on a visit to Canada, Pope Francis issued a historic apology for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with the country’s “catastrophic” policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families, and marginalized generations. According to exhibits released by House investigators, an original script for Donald Trump’s speech the day after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection included tough talk ordering the Justice Department to “ensure all lawbreakers are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law” and stating the rioters “do not represent me.” But those words were crossed out with thick black lines, apparently by Trump.