There are 140 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Aug. 13, 1961, East Germany sealed off the border between Berlin’s eastern and western sectors before building a wall that would divide the city for the next 28 years.
On this date:
In 1521, Spanish conqueror Hernando Cortez captured Tenochtitlan (teh-natch-teet-LAHN’), present-day Mexico City, from the Aztecs.
In 1792, French revolutionaries imprisoned the royal family.
In 1846, the American flag was raised in Los Angeles for the first time.
In 1889, William Gray of Hartford, Connecticut, received a patent for a coin-operated telephone.
In 1910, Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, died in London at age 90.
In 1932, Adolf Hitler rejected the post of vice chancellor of Germany, saying he was prepared to hold out “for all or nothing.”
In 1960, the first two-way telephone conversation by satellite took place with the help of Echo 1.
In 1995, Baseball Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle died at a Dallas hospital of rapidly spreading liver cancer; he was 63.
In 2003, Iraq began pumping crude oil from its northern oil fields for the first time since the start of the war. Libya agreed to set up a $2.7 billion fund for families of the 270 people killed in the 1988 Pan Am bombing.
In 2004, TV chef Julia Child died in Montecito, California, two days short of her 92nd birthday.
In 2011, seven people were killed when a stage collapsed at the Indiana State Fair during a powerful storm just before a concert was to begin. In eastern Pakistan, al-Qaida gunmen kidnapped an American development expert, Warren Weinstein. (Weinstein was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Jan. 2015.)
In 2020, in an interview on Fox Business Network, President Donald Trump acknowledged that he was starving the U.S. Postal Service of money in order to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots. Israel and the United Arab Emirates announced that they were establishing full diplomatic relations in a deal brokered by the U.S.; it required Israel to halt its plan to annex occupied West Bank land sought by the Palestinians.
