Today is Wednesday, June 7, the 158th day of 2006. There are 207 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed to the Continental Congress a resolution calling for a Declaration of Independence.
On this date:
In 1753, Britain’s King George the Second gave his assent to an Act of Parliament establishing the British Museum.
In 1769, frontiersman Daniel Boone first began to explore the present-day Bluegrass State.
In 1848, French postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin was born in Paris.
In 1864, Abraham Lincoln was nominated for another term as president at his party’s convention in Baltimore.
In 1929, the sovereign state of Vatican City came into existence as copies of the Lateran Treaty were exchanged in Rome.
In 1948, the Communists completed their takeover of Czechoslovakia with the resignation of President Eduard Benes.
In 1967, author-critic Dorothy Parker, famed for her caustic wit, died in New York.
In 1972, the musical “Grease” opened on Broadway.
In 1981, Israeli military planes destroyed a nuclear power plant in Iraq, a facility the Israelis charged could have been used to make nuclear weapons.
In 1998, in a crime that shocked the nation, James Byrd Junior, a 49-year-old black man, was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas. (Two white men were later sentenced to death for the crime; a third received life in prison.)
Ten years ago: The Clinton White House acknowledged it had obtained the FBI files of House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s press secretary, former Bush chief of staff James A. Baker the Third and other appointees from Republican administrations, calling it “an innocent bureaucratic mistake.”
Five years ago: A three-judge panel of the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s request for an execution delay. A federal judge refused to stop plans for a World War Two Memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C.
One year ago: President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair embraced a tentative plan to forgive the debt of poor African nations. General Motors chairman Rick Wagoner announced plans to close plants and eliminate 25,000 manufacturing jobs in the United States by 2008.
Today’s Birthdays: Movie director James Ivory is 78. Actress Virginia McKenna is 75. Singer Tom Jones is 66. Poet Nikki Giovanni is 63. Actor Ken Osmond (“Leave It to Beaver”) is 63. Talk show host Jenny Jones is 60. Actress Anne Twomey is 55. Actor Liam Neeson is 54. Actress Colleen Camp is 53. Singer-songwriter Johnny Clegg is 53. Actor William Forsythe is 51. Record producer L.A. Reid is 50. Singer-songwriter Prince is 48. Rock singer-musician Gordon Gano (The Violent Femmes) is 43. Rapper Ecstacy (Whodini) is 42. Rock musician Eric Kretz (Stone Temple Pilots) is 40. Rock musician David Navarro is 39. Actress Helen Baxendale is 36. Actor Karl Urban is 34. Actress Larisa Oleynik (oh-LAY’-nihk) is 25. Tennis player Anna Kournikova is 25. Actor Michael Cera is 18. Actress Shelley Buckner is 17.
Thought for Today: “The history of the world shows that when a mean thing was done, man did it; when a good thing was done, man did it.” — Robert G. Ingersoll, American lawyer and statesman (1833-1899).