This day in history . .
Today is Saturday, Aug. 6, the 219th day of 2016. There are 147 days
left in the year. Today's birthdays: Children's performer Ella Jenkins
is 92. Director Peter Bonerz is 78. Actress Faith Prince is 59.
Basketball Hall of Famer David Robinson is 51. Director M. Night
Shyamalan is 46. In 1926, Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to
swim the English Channel, arriving in Kingsdown, England, from France
in 14½ hours. In 1945, during World War II, the B-29 Superfortress
Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb code-named "Little Boy" on Hiroshima,
Japan, resulting in an estimated 140,000 deaths. (Three days later, the
United States exploded a nuclear device over Nagasaki; five days after
that, Japan surrendered.) In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed
the Voting Rights Act. In 1991, the World Wide Web made its public
debut as a means of accessing webpages over the Internet. In 2011,
insurgents shot down a US military helicopter during fighting in
eastern Afghanistan, killing 30 Americans, most of them belonging to
the same elite Navy commando unit that had slain Osama bin Laden; seven
Afghan commandos also died. Last year, the first Republican
presidential debate aired on Fox News Channel; when the 10 candidates
were asked whether any of them would not pledge to support the eventual
GOP nominee, only Donald Trump raised his hand, saying, "I will not
make the pledge at this time.
