The Almanac
Today is Thursday, Aug. 25, the 238th day of 2016 with 128 to follow.
The moon is waning. Morning stars are Neptune and Uranus. Evening stars
are Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Neptune. Those born on this date
are under the sign of Virgo. They include Czar Ivan IV ( Ivan the
Terrible ) of Russia, in 1530; author Bret Harte in 1836; Joshua Lionel
Cowen, inventor of the electric toy train, in 1877; dancer/actor Ruby
Keeler in 1910; Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly in 1913; actor Michael
Rennie in 1909; actor Van Johnson in 1916; actor Mel Ferrer in 1917;
composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein in 1918; former Alabama Gov.
George Wallace in 1919; Monty Hall, host of Let's Make A Deal, in 1921
(age 95); tennis champion Althea Gibson in 1927; actor Sean Connery in
1930 (age 86); TV personality Regis Philbin in 1931 (age 85); actor Tom
Skerritt in 1933 (age 83); writer Frederick Forsyth in 1938 (age 78);
baseball Hall of Fame member Rollie Fingers in 1946 (age 70); writer
Martin Amis in 1949 (age 67); actor John Savage in 1949 (age 67); rock
singer Gene Simmons of Kiss in 1949 (age 67); singer/songwriter Elvis
Costello in 1954 (age 62); film director Tim Burton in 1958 (age 58);
country singer Billy Ray Cyrus in 1961 (age 55); actor Ally Walker in
1961 (age 55); actor Blair Underwood in 1964 (age 52); actor Joanne
Whalley in 1964 (age 52); television cook Rachael Ray in 1968 (age 48);
supermodel Claudia Schiffer in 1970 (age 46). On this date in history:
In 1609, Galileo Galilei exhibited his first telescope in Venice. In
1718, the city of New Orleans was founded. In 1875, Matthew Webb, a
27-year-old British merchant navy captain, became the first person
known to successfully swim the English Channel. In 1967, a sniper
assassinated American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell in Arlington,
Va. In 1985, Samantha Smith, 13, was killed with her father and six
other people in a plane crash in Maine. Samantha's 1983 letter to
Soviet President Yuri Andropov about her fear of nuclear war earned her
a visit to the Soviet Union. In 1992, researchers reported that
cigarette smoking significantly boosts the risk of developing
cataracts, a leading cause of blindness. In 2006, Pulkova Airlines
Flight 612 crashed near the Russian border in Ukraine, killing 171
people. In 2008, two Afghan army commanders were fired after a U.S.
-led coalition airstrike killed 89 civilians, many of them children.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai blamed the casualties on a failure of
coordination between coalition forces and the Afghan army. In 2009,
U.S. Sen. Edward Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., a liberal fixture in the Senate
for 46 years, died of brain cancer at the age of 77. In 2010, dozens of
girls and teachers at a high school in Kabul, Afghanistan, were
sickened by poison gas. Officials said the Taliban, who had been
accused in eight similar attacks, sought to keep the girls from going
to school. In 2011, Mexican gunmen stormed a Monterrey casino and set
it on fire, killing at least 57 people, mostly women. In 2012, former
astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, died in
Cincinnati. He was 82. In 2013, an offer by Syria to allow a U.N.
investigation of an alleged chemical weapons attack near Damascus was
dismissed by a senior U.S. official as too late to be credible.
Anti-government groups in Syria said government forces used poisonous
gas that killed at least 300 people. In 2014, Tiger Woods announced
that Sean Foley was no longer his coach. Woods said Foley ,who joined
him in 2010 as his third coach as a pro, is one of the outstanding
coaches in golf today. But Woods added that he wasn't going to compete
for a few months and this is the right time to end our professional
relationship. A thought for the day: It has been said that politics is
the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking
resemblance to the first. -- Ronald Reagan .
