The Almanac
Today is Monday, July 27, the 208th day of 2015 with 157 to follow. The
moon is waxing. Morning stars are Mars, Neptune and Uranus. Evening
stars are Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn and Venus. Those born on this date
are under the sign of Leo. They include French novelist Alexandre Dumas
the Younger, author of Camille, in 1824; British aircraft pioneer
Geoffrey de Havilland in 1882; baseball Hall of Fame member Leo
Durocher in 1905; actor Keenan Wynn in 1916; bluegrass star Henry D.
Homer Haynes, of the Homer and Jethro musical duo, in 1920; television
producer Norman Lear in 1922 (age 93); film critic Vincent Canby in
1924; actor Jerry Van Dyke in 1931 (age 84); actor Don Galloway in
1937; singer/songwriter Bobbie Gentry in 1944 (age 71); figure skater
Peggy Fleming in 1948 (age 67); actor/director Betty Thomas in 1948
(age 67); singer Maureen McGovern in 1949 (age 66); actor Maya Rudolph
in 1972 (age 43); actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers in 1977 (age 38); golfer
Jordan Spieth in 1993 (age 22). On this date in history: In 1794,
Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the French Revolution's Reign of
Terror, was overthrown and arrested by the National Convention.
(Robespierre who encouraged the execution, mostly by guillotine, of
more than 17,000 enemies of the revolution, was himself guillotined the
following day.) In 1909, Orville Wright set a record by staying aloft
in a plane for 1 hour, 12 minutes, 40 seconds. In 1921, at the
University of Toronto, Canadian scientists Frederick Banting and
Charles Best successfully isolated insulin -- a hormone they believed
could prevent diabetes -- for the first time. In 1953, a truce
officially ended the Korean War, which had begun June 25, 1950. In
1980, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, deposed shah of Iran, died in an Egyptian
military hospital of cancer at age 60. In 1986, Greg LeMond, 25, of
Sacramento, became the first American to win cycling's most famous
contest, the Tour de France. In 1989, a Korean Air DC-10 crashed in
heavy fog while attempting to land at Tripoli airport in Libya, killing
82 people, four of them on the ground. In 1996, a bomb exploded at
Olympic Park in Atlanta during the Summer Games, killing a woman and
injuring more than 100 other people. In 2002, nine coal miners were
trapped 240 feet underground in southwestern Pennsylvania when a wall
collapsed, inundating them with water. (A three-day rescue operation
saved them all.) In 2003, legendary comic Bob Hope died of pneumonia at
his home in Toluca Lake, Calif. He was 100 years old. In 2011, the U.S.
Postal Service released a list of 3,700 post offices it may close while
revamping the way it does business. In 2012, the Summer Olympics opened
in London, with 10,820 athletes representing 204 countries. In 2013, a
42-year-old gunman killed six people at an apartment complex in
Hialeah, Fla., before a police SWAT team killed him. In 2014, Bobby
Cox, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Tony La Russa, Frank Thomas and Joe
Torre were inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. A thought
for the day: A nation that continues year after year to spend more
money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is
approaching spiritual doom. -- Martin Luther King jr. .
