Today in history

Today is Thursday, July 23, the 205th day of 2020. There are 161 days left in the year. In 1885, Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th president of the United States, died in Mount Mcgregor, New York, at age 63.

In 1914, Austria-hungary presented a list of demands to Serbia following the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serb assassin; Serbia’s refusal to agree to the entire ultimatum led to the outbreak of World War I.

In 1948, American pioneer filmmaker D.W. Griffith died in Los Angeles at age 73.

In 1967, five days of deadly rioting erupted in Detroit as an early morning police raid on an unlicensed bar resulted in a confrontation with local residents that escalated into violence that spread into other parts of the city; 43 people, mostly Blacks, were killed.

In 1982, actor Vic Morrow and two child actors, 7-yearold Myca Dinh Le and 6-year-old Renee Shin-yi Chen, were killed when a helicopter crashed on top of them during filming of a Vietnam War scene for “Twilight Zone: The Movie.” (Director John Landis and four associates were later acquitted of manslaughter charges.)

In 1983, an Air Canada Boeing 767 ran out of fuel while flying from Montreal to Edmonton; the pilots were able to glide the jetliner to a safe emergency landing in Gimli, Manitoba. (The near-disaster occurred because the fuel had been erroneously measured in pounds instead of kilograms at a time when Canada was converting to the metric system.)