Today is Thursday, July 8, the 189th day of 2021.
There are 176 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On July 8, 1947, a New Mexico newspaper, the Roswell Daily Record, quoted officials at Roswell Army Air Field as saying they had recovered a “flying saucer” that crashed onto a ranch; officials then said it was actually a weather balloon. (To this day, there are those who believe what fell to Earth was an alien spaceship carrying extra-terrestrial beings.)
On this date:
In 1776, Col. John Nixon gave the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, outside the State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia.
In 1853, an expedition led by Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Yedo Bay, Japan, on a mission to seek diplomatic and trade relations with the Japanese.
In 1889, The Wall Street Journal was first published.
In 1911, cowgirl “Two-Gun Nan” Aspinwall became the first woman to make a solo trip by horse across the United States, arriving in New York 10 months after departing San Francisco.
In 1950, President Harry S. Truman named Gen. Douglas MacArthur commander-in-chief of United Nations forces in Korea. (Truman ended up sacking MacArthur for insubordination nine months later.)
In 1972, the Nixon administration announced a deal to sell $750 million in grain to the Soviet Union. (However, the Soviets were also engaged in secretly buying subsidized American grain, resulting in what critics dubbed “The Great Grain Robbery.”)
In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford announced he would seek a second term of office.
In 1989, Carlos Saul Menem was inaugurated as president of Argentina in the country’s first transfer of power from one democratically elected civilian leader to another in six decades.
In 1994, Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s communist leader since 1948, died at age 82.
In 2000, Venus Williams beat Lindsay Davenport 6-3, 7-6 (3) for her first Grand Slam title, becoming the first Black female champion at Wimbledon since Althea Gibson in 1957-58.
In 2010, violent protests erupted in Oakland, California, after a Los Angeles jury convicted a white former transit officer, Johannes Mehserle (yoh-HAH’-nes MEZ’-ur-lee), of involuntary manslaughter (instead of murder) in the videotaped fatal shooting of a Black man, Oscar Grant.
In 2019, billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein was charged with sexually abusing dozens of underage girls; the newly unsealed federal indictment came more than a decade after he secretly cut a deal with federal prosecutors to dispose of nearly identical allegations. (Epstein was found unresponsive in his jail cell a month later; the medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.)