day’s Highlights in History:<br>
In 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser was elected president of Egypt.
On this date:
In 1860, a congressional resolution authorized creation of the United States Government Printing Office, which opened the following year.
In 1888, abolitionist Frederick Douglass received one vote from the Kentucky delegation at the Republican convention in Chicago, effectively making him the first Black candidate to have his name placed in nomination for U.S. president. (The nomination went to Benjamin Harrison.)
In 1931, aviators Wiley Post and Harold Gatty took off from New York on a round-the-world flight that lasted eight days and 15 hours.
In 1947, the Senate joined the House in overriding President Harry S. Truman’s veto of the Taft-Hartley Act, designed to limit the power of organized labor.
In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin (ah-LEK’-say koh-SEE’-gihn) opened a three-day summit at Glassboro State College in New Jersey.
In 1969, Warren E. Burger was sworn in as chief justice of the United States by the man he was succeeding, Earl Warren.
In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed Title IX barring discrimination on the basis of sex for “any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” (On the same day, Nixon and White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman discussed using the CIA to obstruct the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Revelation of the tape recording of this conversation sparked Nixon’s resignation in 1974.)
In 1985, all 329 people aboard an Air India Boeing 747 were killed when the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near Ireland because of a bomb authorities believe was planted by Sikh separatists.
In 1994, the movie “Forrest Gump,” starring Tom Hanks as a simple yet kindhearted soul and his serendipitous brushes with greatness, was released by Paramount Pictures.
In 1995, Dr. Jonas Salk, the medical pioneer who developed the first vaccine to halt the crippling rampage of polio, died in La Jolla (HOY’-ah), California, at age 80.
In 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union after a bitterly divisive referendum campaign, toppling Prime Minister David Cameron, who had led the campaign to keep Britain in the EU.
In 2012, Syria and Turkey desperately sought to ease tensions following an incident in which Syria shot down a Turkish reconnaissance plane, saying the plane had entered its airspace. Ashton Eaton broke the world record in the decathlon, finishing with 9,039 points at the U.S. Olympic trials in Eugene, Oregon. (Eaton later surpassed his own record with 9,045 points at the 2015 Beijing world championships.)
In 2017, President Donald Trump signed a bill making it easier for the Department of Veterans Affairs to fire employees, part of a push to overhaul an agency struggling to serve millions of military vets. California Gov. Jerry Brown blocked parole for Charles Manson follower and convicted killer Bruce Davis.
In 2020, the Louisville police department fired an officer involved in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor more than three months earlier, saying Brett Hankison had shown “extreme indifference to the value of human life” when he fired ten rounds into Taylor’s apartment. (A second officer was also fired; Hankison was found not guilty on charges that he endangered neighbors.)
In 2021, a 49-year-old Indiana grandmother became the first person to be sentenced in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol; Anna Morgan Lloyd was sentenced to probation and community service and had to pay $500 in restitution after pleading guilty to a single misdemeanor charge. A member of the Oath Keepers extremist group, Graydon Young, pleaded guilty in a conspiracy case stemming from the Jan. 6 attack, and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. After 13 years of near silence in the conservatorship that controlled her life and money, pop star Britney Spears told a judge in Los Angeles that the conservatorship controlled by her father and others had made her feel demoralized and enslaved, and that it should come to an end. (The judge would agree to that request in November 2021.)
In 2022, Donald Trump hounded the Justice Department to pursue his false election fraud claims, contacting the agency’s leader “virtually every day” and striving in vain to enlist top law enforcement officials in a desperate bid to stay in power, according to testimony to the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. In a major expansion of gun rights, the Supreme Court says Americans have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense. The European Union’s leaders agreed to make Ukraine a candidate for EU membership, setting in motion a potentially yearslong process that could draw the embattled country further away from Russia’s influence and bind it more closely to the West.
Celebrity Birthdays
June 23: Singer Diana Trask is 83. Actor Ted Shackelford (“Knots Landing”) is 77. Actor Bryan Brown (“The Thorn Birds”) is 76. Former “American Idol” judge Randy Jackson is 67. Actor Frances McDormand is 66. Drummer Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth is 61. Director Josh Whedon (“The Avengers,” ″Marvels’ Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) is 59. Singer Chico DeBarge is 53. Actor Selma Blair is 51. Actor Joel Edgerton (“Loving”) is 49. Singer KT Tunstall is 48. Singer Virgo Williams of Ghostown DJs is 48. Actor Emmanuelle Vaugier (“Two and a Half Men”) is 47. Singer-songwriter Jason Mraz is 46. Actor Melissa Rauch (“The Big Bang Theory”) is 43. Singer Duffy is 39.