Today is Tuesday, July 25, the 206th day of 2017. There are 159 days left in the year.
Today's Highlight in History:
On July 25, 1956, the Italian liner SS Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger ship Stockholm off the New England coast late at night and began sinking; 51 people - 46 from the Andrea Doria, five from the Stockholm - were killed. (The Andrea Doria capsized and sank the following morning.)
On this date:
In 1593, France's King Henry IV converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism.
In 1866, Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army of the United States, the first officer to hold the rank.
In 1917, Nikon Corp. had its beginnings with the merger of three optical manufacturers in Japan.
In 1934, Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was assassinated by pro-Nazi Austrians in a failed coup attempt.
In 1946, the United States detonated an atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device.
In 1952, Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.
In 1957, Tunisia became a republic.
In 1960, a Woolworth's store in Greensboro, North Carolina, that had been the scene of a sit-in protest against its whites-only lunch counter dropped its segregation policy.
In 1975, the musical "A Chorus Line" opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre, beginning a run of 6,137 performances.
In 1984, Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya (sah-VEETS'-kah-yah) became the first woman to walk in space as she carried out more than three hours of experiments outside the orbiting space station Salyut 7.
In 1992, opening ceremonies were held in Barcelona, Spain, for the Summer Olympics.
In 2000, a New York-bound Air France Concorde crashed outside Paris shortly after takeoff, killing all 109 people on board and four people on the ground; it was the first-ever crash of the supersonic jet.
