TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Sunday, Aug. 14, the 226th day of 2022. There are 139 days left in the year. Today’s Highlight in History:
On Aug. 14, 1945, President Harry S. Truman announced that Imperial Japan had surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II.
On this date:
■ In 1848, the Oregon Territory was created.
■ In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law.
■ In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, a statement of principles that renounced aggression.
■ In 1947, Pakistan became independent of British rule.
■ In 1948, the Summer Olympics in London ended; they were the first Olympic games held since 1936.
■ In 1973, U.S. bombing of Cambodia came to a halt.
■ In 1980, actor-model Dorothy Stratten, 20, was shot to death by her estranged husband and manager, Paul Snider, who then killed himself.
■ In 1994, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal,” was captured by French agents in Sudan.
■ In 1995, Shannon Faulkner officially became the first female cadet in the history of The Citadel, South Carolina’s state military college. (However, Faulkner quit the school less than a week later, citing the stress of her court fight, and her isolation among the male cadets.)
■ In 1997, an unrepentant Timothy Mcveigh was formally sentenced to death for the Oklahoma City bombing. (Mcveigh was executed by lethal injection in 2001.)
■ In 2009, Charles Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, 60, convicted of trying to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, was released from a Texas prison hospital after more than three decades behind bars.
■ In 2020, India’s coronavirus death toll overtook Britain’s to become the fourth-highest in the world after another single-day record increase in cases.
Ten years ago: Vice President Joe Biden sparked a campaign commotion, telling an audience in southern Virginia that included hundreds of Black voters that Republican Mitt Romney wanted to put them “back in chains” by deregulating Wall Street. (Biden later mocked Republican criticism over the remark while conceding he’d meant to use different words.) Ron Palillo, the actor best known as the nerdy high school student Arnold Horshack on the 1970s sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter,” died in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, at age 63.
Five years ago: Under pressure from right and left, President Donald Trump condemned white supremacist groups by name, declaring them to be “repugnant to everything that we hold dear as Americans.” The CEO of Merck, the nation’s third-largest pharmaceutical company, resigned from a federal advisory council, citing Trump’s failure to explicitly condemn white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. (Kenneth Frazier was one of the few African Americans to head a Fortune 500 company. The CEOS of Intel and Under Armour also resigned from the American Manufacturing Council later in the day.) A jury in Denver, siding with pop star Taylor Swift, ordered a fired radio DJ to pay her a symbolic $1 after concluding that he had groped her.
One year ago: The Taliban captured Mazar-e-sharif, a large, heavily-defended city in northern Afghanistan, and approached the capital Kabul, less than three weeks before the U.S. hoped to complete its troop withdrawal.