Today is Wednesday, July 23, the 204th day of 2014. There are 161 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1588 - English army assembles at Tilbury to repel invasion by Spanish Armada.
1595 - Spanish land at Cornwall, England, and burn Mousehold and Penzance before returning to their ships.
1785 - Prussia's Frederick the Great forms Die Fuerstenbund (League of German Princes).
1829 - The first typewriter is patented by William Burt of Mount Vernon, Michigan.
1882 - Koreans attack Japanese legation in Seoul, the Korean capital, provoking intervention by Japanese and Chinese troops.
1904 - The ice cream cone is invented by Charles E. Menches during the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.
1913 - "Second Revolution" breaks out in south China to force from power military commander Yuan Shih-kai. He wins the armed struggle, ending hope for democracy in China after the abdication of the emperor.
1914 - Austria and Hungary issue ultimatum to Serbia after assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The dispute leads to World War I.
1920 - King Faisal's Arab army is defeated at Maysaloun, and Syria falls under French control.
1921 - The first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party is held in Shanghai. Thirteen delegates represent 50 members.
1945 - Marshal Henri Philippe Petain is put on trial, charged with betraying France during World War II.
1952 - Egyptian military officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrow King Farouk I.
1958 - Queen Elizabeth names four women to peerages — the first women to sit in Britain's House of Lords.
1974 - Greece's military rulers announce they will turn nation back to civilian rule.
1983 - A regional struggle for independence by Tamils in Sri Lanka's north and east escalates into a civil war when they kill 13 Sri Lankan soldiers. The nation's Sinhalese majority responds by killing hundreds of Tamil civilians in the south.
1988 - Iran accuses Iraq of pushing deep into Iranian territory and using chemical weapons.
1991 - New platform for Soviet Communist Party is published, calling for private property, economic integration into world market and freedom of religion.
1993 - British Prime Minister John Major survives a vote of confidence and a reluctant House of Commons approves a treaty of European union on his terms.
1994 - Gambian soldiers proclaim military government in Dakar, Senegal.
1995 - United Nations orders the first combat unit from its rapid reaction force to Sarajevo, in Bosnia, to take out any rebel Serb guns that fire at U.N. peacekeepers.
1996 - Aided by U.S. spy photographs, war crimes investigators in Bosnia recover more than a dozen bodies thought to belong to Muslims executed after the fall of the city of Srebrenica.
1997 - Swiss banks publish lists of World War II era depositors in newspaper advertisements throughout the world.
2000 - American Lance Armstrong wins the prestigious and grueling Tour de France for the second year in a row, four years after being diagnosed with cancer.
2001 - Indonesia's National Assembly impeaches President Abdurahman Wahid in an overwhelming vote and elects his deputy, Megawati Sukarnoputri, as head of state.
2002 - Israeli fighter jet drops a 1-ton bomb on a crowded residential neighborhood in Gaza City, killing Salah Shehada, a Palestinian militant, and 14 civilians. The strike draws widespread condemnation for the high civilian death toll.
2003 - Massachusetts Attorney General's office issues a scathing report following an investigation into the handling of sexual abuse cases by the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Boston. Clergy members and others in the archdiocese are believed to have sexually abused more than 1,000 people over a period of six decades.
2004 - The leaders of the Sept. 11, 2001, commission reiterate their call that Congress and the president must quickly overhaul U.S. intelligence agencies, prompting a Senate and House pledge for an unusual round of hearings in August.
2005 - A Brazilian man killed by British police in a dramatic subway shooting had nothing to do with a series of bombing attacks on London's transit system, police announce, calling the death a "tragedy" and expressing their regret.
2006 - Gunmen attack Oaxaca's university radio station, authorities report, the latest incident in a wave of confrontations and protests that drove many tourists out of the historic Mexican city.
2007 - Afghanistan's last king Mohammad Zahir Shah, a symbol of unity who oversaw four decades of peace before a 1973 palace coup ousted him and war shattered his country, dies at the age of 92.
2008 - Ukraine blames Soviet leaders for a famine that killed millions of people in 1932-33 and publishes documents it says "unequivocally" proved its case — part of its campaign to get the tragedy recognized as genocide.
2009 - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and North Korea exchange pointed barbs, with Clinton declaring North Korea "has no friends left" and the communist regime calling the U.S. official a "schoolgirl."
2010 - Researchers in Mexico say a scientific reconstruction of one of the oldest sets of human remains found in the Americas appears to support theories that the first people who came to the hemisphere migrated from a broader area than once thought.
2011 - Police arrive at the site of an island massacre in Norway about an hour and a half after a gunman first opened fire, slowed because they didn't have quick access to a helicopter and then couldn't find a boat to make their way to the scene just several hundred yards (meters) offshore. The assailant surrenders when police finally reach him, but 82 people died before that.
2012 - Syria threatens to unleash its chemical and biological weapons if the country faces a foreign attack, a desperate warning from a regime that has failed to crush a powerful and strengthening rebellion.
2013 — Prince William and his wife Kate present their newborn son to the world for the first time, as yet without a name. The infant is third in line to rule Britain after his grandfather, Prince Charles, and William.
Today's Birthdays:
Francesco Sforza, Italian mercenary and duke of Milan (1401-1466); Lord Allanbrooke, English soldier (1883-1963); Raymond Chandler, U.S. author (1888-1959); Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia (1891-1975); Elio Vittorini, Italian novelist, translator and literary critic (1908-1966); Don Imus, U.S. radio personality (1940--); Woody Harrelson, U.S. actor (1961--); Daniel Radcliffe, British actor (1989--); Philip Seymour Hoffman, U.S. actor (1967--2014 ); Alison Krauss, U.S. country singer (1971--).
Thought For Today:
To be proud and inaccessible is to be timid and weak — Jean Baptiste Massillon, French clergyman (1663-1742).
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