DAILY ALMANAC
Today is Thursday, June 30, the 181st day of 2022. There are 184 days left in the year. On this date in:
1918: Labor activist and socialist Eugene V. Debs was arrested in Cleveland, charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for a speech he’d made two weeks earlier denouncing U.S. involvement in World War I. (Debs was sentenced to prison and disenfranchised for life.)
1921: President Warren G. Harding nominated former President William Howard Taft to be chief justice of the United States, succeeding the late Edward Douglass White.
1934: Adolf Hitler launched his “blood purge” of political and military rivals in Germany in what came to be known as “The Night of the Long Knives.”
1958: The U.S. Senate passed the Alaska statehood bill by a vote of 64-20.
1971: The Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, that the government could not prevent The New York Times or The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers. A Soviet space mission ended in tragedy when three cosmonauts aboard Soyuz 11 were found dead of asphyxiation inside their capsule after it had returned to Earth.
1982: The proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution expired, having failed to receive the required number of ratifications for its adoption, despite having its seven-year deadline extended by three years.
1985: Thirty-nine American hostages from a hijacked TWA jetliner were freed in Beirut after being held 17 days.
1986: The Supreme Court, in Bowers v. Hardwick, ruled 5-4 that states could outlaw homosexual acts between consenting adults (however, the nation’s highest court effectively reversed this decision in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas).
1994: The U.S. Figure Skating Association stripped Tonya Harding of the national championship and banned her for life for her role in the attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan.
2009: American soldier Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl went missing from his base in eastern Afghanistan, and was later confirmed to have been captured by insurgents after walking away from his post. (Bergdahl was released on May 31, 2014, in exchange for five Taliban detainees; he pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy but was spared a prison sentence by a military judge.)
2013: Nineteen elite firefighters known as members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed battling a wildfire northwest of Phoenix.
Jazz bassist Stanley Clarke is 71. Actor David Garrison (“Married…with Children”) is 70. Guitarist Hal Lindes of Dire Straits is 69. Actor David Alan Grier is 66. Actor Vincent D’onofrio is 63. Actor Rupert Graves (“The Madness of King George”) is 59. Bassist
Tom Drummond of Better Than Ezra is 53. Actor
Tony Rock (“Living Biblically”) is 53. Actor Monica Potter is 51. Actor
Molly Parker (“House of Cards”) is 50. Actor Lizzy Caplan (“Masters of Sex,” “Mean Girls”) is 40. Guitarist James Adam Shelley of American Authors is 39. Country singer
Cole Swindell is 39. Singer and “American Idol” winner Fantasia Barrino is 38. Actor Sean Marquette (“The Goldbergs”) is 34.