There are 147 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Aug. 6, 1945, during World War II, the U.S. B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb code-named “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, Japan, resulting in an estimated 140,000 deaths. (Three days later, the United States exploded a nuclear device over Nagasaki; five days after that, Imperial Japan surrendered.)
On this date:
In 1806, the Holy Roman Empire went out of existence as Emperor Francis II abdicated.
In 1825, Upper Peru became the autonomous republic of Bolivia.
In 1942, Queen Wilhemina of the Netherlands became the first reigning queen to address a joint session of Congress, telling lawmakers that despite Nazi occupation, her people’s motto remained, “No surrender.”
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.
In 1973, entertainer Stevie Wonder was seriously injured in a car accident in North Carolina.
In 1978, Pope Paul VI died at Castel Gandolfo at age 80.
In 1991, the World Wide Web made its public debut as a means of accessing webpages over the Internet. TV newsman Harry Reasoner died in Norwalk, Connecticut, at age 68.
In 2003, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger used an appearance on NBC’s “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” to announce his successful bid to replace California Gov. Gray Davis.
In 2009, Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice by a Senate vote of 68-31. John Hughes, 59, Hollywood’s youth movie director of the 1980s and ’90s, died in New York City.
In 2011 insurgents shot down a U.S. military helicopter during fighting in eastern Afghanistan, killing 30 Americans, most of them belonging to the same elite Navy commando unit that had slain Osama bin Laden; seven Afghan commandos also died.
In 2013, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan went on trial at Fort Hood, Texas, charged with killing 13 people and wounding 32 others in a 2009 attack. (Hasan, who admitted carrying out the attack, was convicted and sentenced to death.)
