TODAY IN HISTORY
On July 6, 1483, England’s King crowned. Richard III was
was In 1535 executed Sir Thomas in London More after being convicted of treason.
In 1777 American forces abandoned Ft. Ticonderoga to English Gen. John Burgoyne in the Revolutionary War.
In 1854 the first official meeting of the Republican Party took place in Jackson, Mich.
In 1885 French scientist Louis Pasteur gave the first successful anti-rabies inoculation to a boy who had been bitten by an infected dog.
In 1917, during World War I, Arab forces led by T.E. Lawrence captured the port of Aqaba from the Turks.
In 1923 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed.
In 1928 the first all-talking movie feature, “The Lights of New York,” was previewed in New York.
In 1933 the first All-Star baseball game was played, in Comiskey Park; the American League defeated the National League 4-2.
In 1944, 169 people died in a fire that broke out in the main tent of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Conn.
In 1945 President Harry Truman signed an executive order establishing the Medal of Freedom. Also in 1945 Nicaragua became the first nation to formally accept the United Nations charter.
In 1957 Althea Gibson became the first black tennis player to win a Wimbledon singles title, defeating fellow American Darlene Hard.
In 1967 the Biafran war erupted; it would last 2½ years and leave 600,000 people dead.
In 1995 the prosecution rested at the O.J. Simpson murder trial in Los Angeles.
In 1997 the rover Sojourner rolled down a ramp from the Mars Pathfinder lander onto the Martian landscape to begin inspecting soil and rocks.
In 1999 Labor Party leader Ehud Barak was sworn in as Israel’s prime minister after defeating Likud incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu in May.
In 2000 the German parliament offered a formal apology to Nazi-era slave and forced laborers as it passed a bill setting up a $5 billion compensation fund.
Also in 2000 the body of 19-year-old Cory Erving, son of basketball star Julius “Dr. J” Erving, was found in his car at the bottom of a Florida pond; he had been missing since May 28. Also in
2000 Venus Williams beat her younger sister Serena 6-2, 7-6 (3) to reach the Wimbledon final; their singles match was the first between sisters in a Grand Slam semifinal.
In 2004 presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry named North Carolina Sen. John Edwards as his running mate.
In 2005 New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed after refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating the leak of an undercover CIA operative’s name. (Miller was jailed for 85 days before agreeing to testify.) Also in 2005 London was selected to host the 2012 Olympics. Also in
2005 L. Patrick Gray, the acting FBI director during Watergate, died in Atlantic Beach, Fla.; he was 88.
In 2013 an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 jet with 307 passengers and crew aboard from Seoul, South Korea, crashed while landing at San Francisco International Airport. Three passengers died and 182 others were injured. (An investigation later blamed the pilots.) Also
in 2013 a runaway freight train carrying tankers of crude oil derailed and exploded in Lac-Megantic, a Quebec town near Maine. Forty-seven people died and more than 40 buildings were demolished.
In 2015 Pope Francis received a hero’s welcome in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, as he celebrated the first public Mass of his South American tour.
In 2016 Pokemon Go, a mobile take on the classic franchise, was released by Niantic and the Pokemon Company and within a week took the crown for the fastest app to reach the top spot of the App Store and Google Play for iOS and Android devices, respectively, as well as the most active mobile game ever in the United States thanks to its whopping total of 21 million user; because the game allows players to capture Pokemon in real-world locations, a number of injuries were reported as people with eyes glued to their phones wandered outside their homes. Also in 2016 double-amputee Olympian Oscar Pistorius was sentenced to six years in a South African prison for murdering girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.