This day in history

Today is Wednesday, June 7, the 158th day of 2023. There are 207 days left in the year. ºBirthdays: Movie director James Ivory is 95. Actor Virginia McKenna is 92. Singer Tom Jones is 83. Poet Nikki Giovanni is 80. Former talk show host Jenny Jones is 77. Americana singer-songwriter Willie Nile is 75. Actor Anne Twomey is 72. Actor Liam Neeson is 71. Actor Colleen Camp is 70. Author Louise Erdrich is 69. Actor William Forsythe is 68. Record producer L.A. Reid is 67. Latin pop singer Juan Luis Guerra is 66. Former vice president Mike Pence is 64. The Violent Femmes singer-songwriter Gordon Gano is 60. Actor Helen Baxendale is 53. Senator Ben Ray Luján, Democrat of New Mexico, is 51. Actor Karl Urban is 51. TV personality Bear Grylls is 49. Rock musician Eric Johnson (The Shins) is 47. Actor Adrienne Frantz is 45. Actor-comedian Bill Hader is 45. Actor Anna Torv is 44. Actor Larisa Oleynik is 42. Former tennis player Anna Kournikova is 42. Actor Michael Cera is 35. Actor Shelley Buckner is 34. Rapper Iggy Azalea is 33. Actor-model Emily Ratajkowski is 32. Rapper Fetty Wap is 32.

ºIn 1712, Pennsylvania’s colonial assembly voted to ban the further importation of enslaved people.

ºIn 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia offered a resolution to the Continental Congress stating “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” ºIn 1892, Homer Plessy, a “Creole of color,” was arrested for refusing to leave a whites-only car of the East Louisiana Railroad. (Ruling on his case, the US Supreme Court upheld “separate but equal” racial segregation, a concept it renounced in 1954.) ºIn 1929, the sovereign state of Vatican City came into existence as copies of the Lateran Treaty were exchanged in Rome.

ºIn 1942, the Battle of Midway ended in a decisive victory for American naval forces over Imperial Japan, marking a turning point in the Pacific War.

ºIn 1965, the US Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, struck down, 7-2, a Connecticut law used to prosecute a Planned Parenthood clinic in New Haven for providing contraceptives to married couples. ºIn 1981, Israeli military planes destroyed a nuclear power plant in Iraq, a facility the Israelis charged could have been used to make nuclear weapons. ºIn 1998, in a crime that shocked the nation, James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old Black man, was hooked by a chain to a pickup truck and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas. (Two white men would be sentenced to death for the crime.)

ºIn 2006, Abu Musab alZarqawi, the founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed by a US airstrike.

ºIn 2013, President Obama vigorously defended the government’s just-disclosed collection of massive amounts of information from phone and Internet records as a necessary defense against terrorism, and assured Americans, “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.”

ºIn 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump claimed their parties’ presidential nominations following contests in New Jersey, California, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

ºIn 2018, the Trump administration said in a court filing that it would no longer defend key parts of the Affordable Care Act, including provisions that guarantee access to health insurance regardless of any medical conditions; it was a rare departure from the Justice Department’s practice of defending federal laws in court.

ºLast year, Russia claimed to have nearly taken full control of one of the two provinces that make up Ukraine’s Donbas, bringing the Kremlin closer to its goal of capturing the eastern industrial heartland of coal mines and factories.