Today is Saturday, Aug. 15, the 228th day of 2020. There are 138 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On August 15, 1947, India became independent after some 200 years of British rule.
On this date:
In 1483, the Sistine Chapel was consecrated by Pope Sixtus IV.
In 1769, Napoleon Bonaparte was born on the island of Corsica.
In 1935, humorist Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post were killed when their airplane crashed near Point Barrow in the Alaska Territory.
In 1939, the MGM musical “The Wizard of Oz” opened at the Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood.
In 1944, during World War II, Allied forces landed in southern France in Operation Dragoon.
In 1945, in a pre-recorded radio address, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced that his country had accepted terms of surrender for ending World War II.
In 1965, the Beatles played to a crowd of more than 55,000 at New York’s Shea Stadium.
In 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair opened in upstate New York.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon announced a 90-day freeze on wages, prices and rents.
In 1998, 29 people were killed by a car bomb that tore apart the center of Omagh (OH’-mah), Northern Ireland; a splinter group calling itself the Real IRA claimed responsibility.
In 2004, in Athens, the U.S. men’s basketball team lost 92-73 to Puerto Rico, only the third Olympic defeat ever for the Americans and the first since adding pros.
In 2017, President Donald Trump, who’d faced harsh criticism for initially blaming the deadly weekend violence in Charlottesville, Virginia on “many sides,” told reporters that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the confrontation and that groups protesting against the white supremacists were “also very violent.” (In between those statements, at the urging of aides, Trump had offered a more direct condemnation of white supremacists.)
