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Today is Monday, August 12, the 225th day of 2024. There are 141 days left in the year.
Today in history:
On August 12, 2017, a driver drove into a crowd of people peacefully protesting a white nationalist rally in the college town of Charlottesville, Virginia, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring more than a dozen others. (The attacker, James Alex Fields, was sentenced to life in prison on 29 federal hate crime charges, and life plus 419 years on state charges.)
Also on this date:
In 1867, President Andrew Johnson initiated an effort to impeach him because he defied Congress by suspending Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, with whom he had clashed over Reconstruction policies. (Johnson was acquitted by the Senate.)
In 1898, fighting in the Spanish-American War came to an end.
In 1909, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indianapolis 500, first opened.
In 1944, during World War II, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the eldest son of Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, was killed along with his co-pilot when their explosive-laden naval plane exploded over England.
In 1953, the Soviet Union conducted a secret test of its first hydrogen bomb.
In 1960, the first balloon communications satellite – Echo 1 – was launched by the United States from Cape Canaveral.
In 1981, IBM introduced its first personal computer, the model 5150, at a press conference in New York.
In 1985, the world’s worst single-aircraft disaster occurred when a crippled Japan Airlines Boeing 747 crashed into a mountain on a domestic flight, killing 520 people. Four passengers survived.
In 1990, fossil collector Sue Hendrickson found one of the largest and best preserved Tyrannosaurus Rex skeletons ever discovered; The skeleton, nicknamed “Sue” after Hendrickson, is now on display at the Field Museum in Chicago.
In 1994, during baseball’s eighth work stoppage since 1972, players went on strike rather than allow team owners to cap their salaries.
In 2000, the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk and its 118-man crew were lost during naval exercises in the Barents Sea.
In 2013, James “Whitey” Bulger, the feared Boston mob boss who became one of the country’s most wanted fugitives, was convicted of a string of eleven murders and dozens of other gangland crimes, many of which were committed while he was reportedly in prison fed up. an FBI informant. (Bulger was sentenced to life in prison; he was fatally beaten in a West Virginia prison in 2018, hours after being transferred from a Florida facility.)
In 2022, Salman Rushdie, the author whose writing prompted death threats from Iran in the 1980s, was attacked and stabbed in the neck by a man who stormed onto the stage as he was about to give a lecture in Western New York .
Today’s Birthdays:
- Investor and philanthropist George Soros is 94.
- Actor George Hamilton is 85.
- Singer-musician Mark Knopfler (Dire Straits) is 75.
- Singer Kid Creole (Kid Creole and the Coconuts) is 74.
- Film director Chen Kaige is 72.
- Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny is 70.
- Actor Bruce Greenwood is 68.
- Basketball Hall of Famer Lynette Woodard is 65.
- Rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot is 61.
- Actor Peter Krause (KROW’-zuh) is 59.
- Tennis Hall of Famer Pete Sampras is 53.
- Actor-comedian Michael Ian Black is 53.
- Actor Yvette Nicole Brown is 53.
- Actor Casey Affleck is 49.
- Boxer Tyson Fury is 36.
- Actor Lakeith Stanfield is 33.
- NBA All-Star Khris Middleton is 33.
- Actor Cara Delevingne (DEHL’-eh-veen) is 32.
- Tennis player Stefanos Tsitsipas is 26.
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