Today is Wednesday, Aug. 23, the 235th day of 2017. There are 130 days left in the year.
Today's Highlight in History:
On August 23, 1927, amid worldwide protests, Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston for the murders of two men during a 1920 robbery.
On this date:
In 1305, Scottish rebel leader Sir William Wallace was executed by the English for treason.
In 1775, Britain's King George III proclaimed the American colonies to be in a state of "open and avowed rebellion."
In 1858, "Ten Nights in a Bar-room," a play by Timothy Shay Arthur about the perils of alcohol, opened in New York.
In 1913, Copenhagen's Little Mermaid statue, inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen story, was unveiled in the harbor of the Danish capital.
In 1914, Japan declared war against Germany in World War I.
In 1926, silent film star Rudolph Valentino died in New York at age 31.
In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in Moscow.
In 1947, an audience at the Hollywood Bowl heard President Harry S. Truman's daughter, Margaret, give her first public concert as a singer (she had previously peformed on the radio).
In 1960, Broadway librettist Oscar Hammerstein (HAM'-ur-STYN') II, 65, died in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
In 1973, a bank robbery-turned-hostage-taking began in Stockholm, Sweden; the four hostages ended up empathizing with their captors, a psychological condition now referred to as "Stockholm Syndrome."
In 1982, Lebanon's parliament elected Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayel president. (However, Gemayel was assassinated some three weeks later.)
In 1989, in a case that inflamed racial tensions in New York, Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old black youth, was shot dead after he and his friends were confronted by a group of white youths in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. (Gunman Joey Fama was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison; he will be eligible for parole in 2022.)