There are 138 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Aug. 15, 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair opened in upstate New York.
On this date:
In 1057, Macbeth, King of Scots, was killed in battle by Malcolm, the eldest son of King Duncan, whom Macbeth had slain.
In 1769, Napoleon Bonaparte was born on the island of Corsica.
In 1914, the Panama Canal officially opened as the SS Ancon crossed the just-completed waterway between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
In 1935, humorist Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post were killed when their airplane crashed near Point Barrow in the Alaska Territory.
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 1947, India became independent after some 200 years of British rule.
In 1961, as workers began constructing a Berlin Wall made of concrete, East German soldier Conrad Schumann leapt to freedom over a tangle of barbed wire.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon announced a 90-day freeze on wages, prices and rents.
In 1989, F.W. de Klerk was sworn in as acting president of South Africa, one day after P.W. Botha resigned as the result of a power struggle within the National Party.
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 2003, bouncing back from the largest blackout in U.S. history, cities from the Midwest to Manhattan restored power to millions of people.
