Highlights in history
• In 1717, George Frideric Handel’s “Water Music” was first performed by an orchestra during a boating party on the River Thames, with the musicians on one barge, and King George I listening from another.
• In 1862, during the Civil War, Congress approved the Second Confiscation Act, which declared that all slaves taking refuge behind Union lines were to be set free.
• In 1918, Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks.
• In 1945, following Nazi Germany’s surrender, President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British
Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill began meeting at Potsdam in the final Allied summit of World War II.
• In 1962, the United States conducted its last atmospheric nuclear test to date, detonating a 20-kiloton device, codenamed Little Feller I, at the Nevada Test Site.
• In 1975, an Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower link-up of its kind.
• In 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Europe-bound Boeing 747, exploded and crashed off Long Island, New York, shortly after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 230 people on board.
• In 1997, Woolworth Corp. announced it was closing its 400 remaining five-and-dime stores across the country, ending 117 years in business.
• In 2009, former CBS anchorman
Walter Cronkite died in New York at 92.
• In 2014, Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man accused of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes, died shortly after being wrestled to the ground by New York City police officers; a video of the takedown showed Garner repeatedly saying, “I can’t breathe.” (Garner’s family received $5.9 million from the city in 2015 to settle a wrongful death claim.)
Central Ohio history
• In 1973, the French Market opened at the Continent.
Birthdays
• Actor Donald Sutherland is 85 • Rock musician Spencer Davis is 81 • Sportscaster Verne Lundquist is 80 • Actress Lucie Arnaz is 69
• Actor David Hasselhoff is 68
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel is 66
• Television producer Mark Burnett is 60
• Singer Regina Belle is 57
• Country singer Craig Morgan is 56
• Contemporary Christian singer Susan
Ashton is 53
• Actor Jason Clarke is 51
• Rapper Sole’ is 47
• Country singer Luke Bryan is 44 • Actor Tom Cullen is 35 • Rhythm-and-blues singer Jeremih is 33
• Actress Billie Lourd is 28
• Actor Leo Howard is 23
Source: Associated Press