Today is Thursday, Aug. 25, the 237th day of 2022. There are 128 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Aug. 25, 2018, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who had spent years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam before a 35-year political career that took him to the Republican presidential nomination, died at the age of 81 after battling brain cancer for more than a year.
On this date:
In 1718, hundreds of French colonists arrived in Louisiana, with some settling in present-day New Orleans.
In 1928, an expedition led by Richard E. Byrd set sail from Hoboken, N.J., on its journey to Antarctica.
In 1944, during World War II, Paris was liberated by Allied forces after four years of Nazi occupation.
In 1958, the game show “Concentration” premiered on NBC-TV.
In 1981, the U.S. spacecraft Voyager 2 came within 63,000 miles of Saturn’s cloud cover, sending back pictures of and data about the ringed planet.
In 1985, Samantha Smith, 13, the schoolgirl whose letter to Yuri V. Andropov resulted in her famous peace tour of the Soviet Union, died with her father in an airliner crash in Auburn, Maine, that also killed four other passengers and two crew members.
In 2001, R&B singer Aaliyah was killed with eight others in a plane crash in the Bahamas; she was 22.
In 2009, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the U.S. Senate, died at age 77 in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, after a battle with a brain tumor.
In 2014, a funeral was held in St. Louis for Michael Brown, the Black 18-year-old who was shot to death by a police officer in suburban Ferguson.
Today’s Birthdays: Actor Tom Skerritt is 89. Author Frederick Forsyth is 84. Rock singer-actor Gene Simmons is 73. Rock singer Rob Halford is 71. Rock singer Elvis Costello is 68. Movie director Tim Burton is 64. Actor Christian LeBlanc is 64. Country singer Cyrus (AKA Billy Ray Cyrus) is 61. Actor Blair Underwood is 58. Television chef Rachael Ray is 54. Country singer Jo Dee Messina is 52. Model Claudia Schiffer is 52. Actor Kel Mitchell is 44. Actor Rachel Bilson is 41.
