World News
July 25, Tuskegee Syphilis Study unveiled
Today is Thursday, July 25, the 207th day of 2024. There are 159 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On July 25, 1972, the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment came to light when The Associated Press reported that the U.S. Public Health Service, in collaboration with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been admitting poor, black, rural male patients with syphilis for the past four decades to go without treatment, which would even kill more than 100 of them, as a way to study the disease.
Also on this date:
In 1866, Ulysses S. Grant was appointed general of the United States Army, the first officer to hold this rank.
In 1943, Benito Mussolini was dismissed as Prime Minister of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III and arrested. (He was later rescued by the Nazis and reasserted his authority.)
In 1946, the United States detonated an atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean in the first underwater test of the device.
In 1956, the Italian liner SS Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger liner Stockholm off the coast of New England late at night and began to sink; 51 people – 46 from the Andrea Doria, five from the Stockholm – were killed. (The Andrea Doria capsized and sank the next morning.)
In 1960, a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, which had been the scene of nearly six months of sit-in protests against the whites-only lunch counter, abandoned its segregation policy.
In 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the first ‘test tube baby’, was born in Oldham, England; she was conceived through the technique of in vitro fertilization.
In 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan’s King Hussein signed a declaration at the White House ending their country’s 46-year-old formal state of war.
In 2000, an Air France Concorde bound for New York crashed outside Paris shortly after takeoff, killing all 109 people on board and four people on the ground; it was the very first crash of the supersonic jet aircraft.
In 2010, online whistleblower Wikileaks posted approximately 90,000 leaked US military documents that amounted to a detailed account of the war in Afghanistan, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings and covert operations against Taliban figures.
In 2018, a study published in the journal Science revealed that a huge lake of salt water appears to be buried deep within Mars, raising the possibility of finding life on the planet.
In 2019, President Donald Trump had a second phone call with the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which he requested Zelenskyy’s help in gathering potentially damaging information about former Vice President Joe Biden; that evening, an official from the White House Office of Management and Budget signed a document officially suspending military aid to Ukraine.
In 2022, during a visit to Canada, Pope Francis issued a historic apology for the Catholic Church’s collaboration with the country’s “catastrophic” policy of indigenous residential schools, saying that the forced assimilation of indigenous peoples into Christian society destroyed cultures, torn apart families and marginalized generations.
Today’s Birthdays:
- Elizabeth Francis, the oldest living American, is 114 years old.
- Folk pop singer-musician Bruce Woodley (The Seekers) is 82.
- Rock musician Jim McCarty (The Yardbirds) is 81.
- Reggae singer Rita Marley is 78.
- Musician Verdine White (Earth, Wind & Fire) is 73.
- Model-actor Iman is 69.
- Rock musician Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) is 66.
- Celebrity chef/TV personality Geoffrey Zakarian is 65.
- Actor Matt LeBlanc is 57.
- Actor Wendy Raquel Robinson is 57.
- Actor David Denman is 51.
- Actor Jay R. Ferguson is 50.
- Actor James Lafferty (TV: “One Tree Hill”) is 39.
- Actor Meg Donnelly (TV: “American Housewife”) is 24.
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