Today is Sunday, June 17, the 168th day of 2018. There are 197 days left in the year. This is Father’s Day.
Today’s Highlight in History: On June 17, 1775, the Revolutionary War Battle of Bunker Hill resulted in a costly victory for the British, who suffered heavy losses.
On this date:
1397: The Treaty of Kalmar created a union between the kingdoms of Sweden, Denmark and Norway.
1579: Sir Francis Drake arrived in present-day northern California, naming it New Albion and claiming English sovereignty.
1818: French composer Charles Gounod, known for the operas “Faust” and “Romeo et Juliette,” was born in Paris.
1928: Amelia Earhart embarked on a trans-Atlantic flight from Newfoundland to Wales with pilots Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon, becoming the first woman to make the trip as a passenger.
1930: President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which boosted U.S. tariffs to historically high levels, prompting foreign retaliation.
1948: A United Air Lines DC-6 crashed near Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, killing all 43 people on board.
1953: U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas stayed the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, originally set for the next day, the couple’s 14th wedding anniversary. (They were put to death June 19.)
1967: China successfully tested its first thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb.
1972: President Richard Nixon’s eventual downfall began with the arrest of five burglars inside Democratic national headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex.
1987: Charles Glass, a journalist on leave from ABC News, was kidnapped in Beirut by pro-Iranian guerrillas. (Glass escaped his captors in August 1987.)
1994: After leading police on a slow-speed chase on Southern California freeways, O.J. Simpson was arrested and charged with murder in the slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend Ronald Goldman. (Simpson was later acquitted in a criminal trial, but held liable in a civil trial.)
2015: Nine people were shot to death in a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina; suspect Dylann Roof was arrested the following morning. (Roof has since been convicted of federal hate crimes and sentenced to death; he later pleaded guilty to state murder charges and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.)