Today is Friday, Aug. 14, the 227th day of 2020. There are 139 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On August 14, 1997, an unrepentant Timothy McVeigh was formally sentenced to death for the Oklahoma City bombing. (McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in 2001.)
On this date:
In 1900, international forces, including U.S. Marines, entered Beijing to put down the Boxer Rebellion, which was aimed at purging China of foreign influence.
In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law.
In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, a statement of principles that renounced aggression.
In 1945, President Harry S. Truman announced that Imperial Japan had surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II.
In 1948, the Summer Olympics in London ended; they were the first Olympic games held since 1936.
In 1973, U.S. bombing of Cambodia came to a halt.
In 1980, workers went on strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk (guh-DANSK’), Poland, in a job action that resulted in creation of the Solidarity labor movement.
In 1992, the White House announced that the Pentagon would begin emergency airlifts of food to Somalia to alleviate mass deaths by starvation.
In 1995, Shannon Faulkner officially became the first female cadet in the history of The Citadel, South Carolina’s state military college. (However, Faulkner quit the school less than a week later, citing the stress of her court fight, and her isolation among the male cadets.)
In 2008, President George W. Bush signed consumer-safety legislation that banned lead from children’s toys, imposing the toughest standard in the world.
In 2009, Charles Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, 60, convicted of trying to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, was released from a Texas prison hospital after more than three decades behind bars.
In 2018, a highway bridge collapsed in the Italian city of Genoa during a storm, sending vehicles plunging nearly 150 feet and leaving 43 people dead.
Nothing about the big Northeast blackout of 2003?!? #FakeNews
OK, here's some news for the whiners in the Northeast that couldn't deal without electricity for a couple of hours...
The Northeast blackout of 2003 was a widespread power outage throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, and the Canadian province of Ontario on August 14, 2003, beginning just after 4:10 p.m. EDT.[1]
Most places restored power by midnight (within 7 hours), some as early as 6 p.m. on August 14 (within 2 hours).[2] New York subways resumed limited services around 8 p.m.[2] Full power was restored to New York City and Toronto on August 16.[3] At the time, it was the world's second most widespread blackout in history, after the 1999 Southern Brazil blackout.[4][5] The outage, which was much more widespread than the Northeast blackout of 1965, affected an estimated 10 million people in southern and central Ontario, and 45 million people in eight U.S. states.
The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of the entire Northeast region.
My power was out for longer than that a couple of months ago, guess I should have included that...
