Today is Friday, July 16, the 197th day of 2010. There are 168 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
On July 16, 1980, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan won the Republican presidential nomination at the party’s convention in Detroit.
ON THIS DATE
In 1790, a site along the Potomac River was designated the permanent seat of the United States government; the area became Washington, D.C.
In 1862, David G. Farragut became the first rear admiral in the United States Navy.
In 1935, the first parking meters were installed, in Oklahoma City.
In 1945, the United States exploded its first experimental atomic bomb, in the desert of Alamogordo, N.M.
In 1957, Marine Maj. John Glenn set a transcontinental speed record by flying a jet from California to New York in 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8 seconds.
In 1964, as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in San Francisco, Barry M. Goldwater said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and that “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
In 1969, Apollo 11, blasted off from Cape Kennedy on the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.
In 1970, Three Rivers Stadium, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pittsburgh Pirates, officially opened as the Pirates lost to the Cincinnati Reds 3-2. (The stadium was demolished in 2001.)
In 1973, during the Senate Watergate hearings, former White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield publicly revealed the existence of President Richard Nixon’s secret taping system.
In 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, died when their single-engine plane, piloted by Kennedy, plunged into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
In 2000, families and friends of the victims of the TWA Flight 800 explosion broke ground for a new memorial on the Long Island shore not far from where the plane went down, killing all 230 people on board.
In 2005, a suicide bomber blew up a fuel tanker near a Shiite mosque in Musayyib, Iraq, killing nearly 100 people. More than a week after the London terror bombings, British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned that an “evil ideology” of Islamic extremism was bent on spreading terror through the West.
Associated Press
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