Today in history

Today is Sunday, July 15, the 196th day of 2018. There are 169 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On July 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon delivered a televised address in which he announced that he had accepted an invitation to visit the People’s Republic of China. On this date: In 1799, French soldiers in Egypt discovered the Rosetta Stone, which proved instrumental in deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In 1870, Georgia became the last Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union. Manitoba entered confederation as the fifth Canadian province.

In 1910, the term “Alzheimer’s disease” was used to describe a progressive form of presenile dementia in the book “Clinical Psychiatry” by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who credited the work of his colleague, Alois Alzheimer, in identifying the condition.

In 1932, President Herbert Hoover announced he was slashing his own salary by 20 percent, from $75,000 to $60,000 a year; he also cut Cabinet members’ salaries by 15 percent, from $15,000 to $12,750 a year.

In 1964, Sen. Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona was nominated for president by the Republican national convention in San Francisco.

In 1976, a 36-hour kidnap ordeal began for 26 schoolchildren and their bus driver as they were abducted near Chowchilla, California, by three gunmen and imprisoned in an underground cell. (The captives escaped unharmed; the kidnappers were caught.)

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter delivered his “malaise” speech in which he lamented what he called a “crisis of confidence” in America.

In 1985, a visibly gaunt Rock Hudson appeared at a news conference with actress Doris Day (it was later revealed Hudson was suffering from AIDS).

In 1992, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton was nominated for president at the Democratic national convention in New York.

In 1997, fashion designer Gianni Versace (ver-SAH’chay), 50, was shot dead outside his Miami Beach home; suspected gunman Andrew Phillip Cunanan, 27, was found dead eight days later, a suicide. (Investigators believed Cunanan killed four other people before Versace in a crosscountry spree that began the previous March.)

In 2002, John Walker Lindh, an American who’d fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, pleaded guilty in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, to two felonies in a deal sparing him life in prison.

In 2010, after 85 days, BP stopped the flow of oil from a blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico using a 75-ton cap lowered onto the wellhead earlier in the week.

Ten years ago: President George W. Bush said the nation’s troubled financial system was “basically sound,” and he urged lawmakers to quickly enact legislation to prop up mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A judge in Los Angeles sentenced Helen Golay, 77, and Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, to two consecutive life terms each for murdering two indigent men to collect insurance policies taken out on their lives. In an All-Star game that began at dusk and ended at 1:37 a.m. the next morning, the American League defeated the National League 4-3 in 15 innings at Yankee Stadium.