Flashback
Today is Saturday, Aug. 19, the 231st day of 2006. There are 134 days left in the year.
Today’s highlight in history: On Aug. 19, 1812, the USS Constitution defeated the British frigate Guerriere east of Nova Scotia during the War of 1812.
On this date:
In 1856, 150 years ago, Gail Borden Jr. received a patent for his invention, condensed milk.
In 1906, 100 years ago, Philo T. Farnsworth, one of the pioneering inventors of television, was born in Beaver County, Utah.
In 1929, the comedy program “Amos and Andy,” starring Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, made its network radio debut on NBC.
In 1934, a plebiscite in Germany approved the vesting of sole executive power in Adolf Hitler.
In 1942, about 6,000 Canadian and British soldiers launched a disastrous raid against the Germans at Dieppe, France, suffering about 50 percent casualties.
In 1955, severe flooding in the northeastern U.S. claimed some 200 lives.
In 1960, a tribunal in Moscow convicted American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers of espionage.
In 1976, President Ford won the Republican presidential nomination at the party’s convention in Kansas City.
In 1981, two U.S. Navy F-14 jet fighters shot down a pair of Soviet-built Libyan SU-22s in a dogfight over the Gulf of Sidra.
In 1991, Soviet hard-liners announced to a shocked world that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had been removed from power. (The coup collapsed two days later.)
Ten years ago: Ralph Nader accepted the presidential nomination of the Green Party in Los Angeles. A judge sentenced former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker to four years’ probation for his Whitewater crimes.
Five years ago: An underground methane and coal dust explosion in Ukraine killed 55 miners. Davis Toms won the PGA Championship with a 1-under-par 69. Donald Woods, a veteran South African newspaper editor and apartheid opponent, died in Sutton, England, at age 67. Soul singer Betty Everett died in Beloit, Wis., at age 61.
One year ago: A Texas jury found pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. liable for the death of a man who’d taken the once-popular painkiller Vioxx, awarding his widow $253.4 million in damages. (Texas caps on punitive damages reduced that figure to about $26 million; Merck plans to appeal.) Attackers firing Katyusha rockets narrowly missed a U.S. amphibious assault ship docked at the Red Sea resort of Aqaba, but killed a Jordanian soldier. Britain’s former Northern Ireland chief, Mo Mowlam, died after hitting her head in a fall in Canterbury, England; she was 55.