CHICKEN BUCKETS: TODAY IN HISTORY

Monday, August 20, 2012

TODAY IN HISTORY

Monday, August 20, 2012

AP Highlight in History:
On Aug. 20, 1968, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague Spring" liberalization drive of Alexander Dubcek's regime.

AP Photo

On this date in:
1833	Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the United States, was born in North Bend, Ohio.
1914	German forces occupied Brussels, Belgium, during World War I.
1918	Britain opened an offensive on the Western front during World War I.
1940	British Prime Minister Winston Churchill paid tribute to the Royal Air Force, saying, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
1953	The Soviet Union publicly acknowledged it had tested a hydrogen bomb.
1955	Hundreds of people were killed in anti-French rioting in Morocco and Algeria.
1964	President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a nearly $1 billion anti-poverty measure.
1977	The United States launched Voyager 2, an unmanned spacecraft carrying a 12-inch copper phonograph record containing greetings in dozens of languages, samples of music and sounds of nature.
1992	The Republican National Convention in Houston nominated President George H.W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle for a second term.
1998	Retaliating for deadly embassy bombings in East Africa, the United States launched cruise missile strikes against al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan and what was described as a chemical plant in Sudan.
2006	Former Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, who took the iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising picture during World War II, died at age 94.
2009	Voting in Afghanistan's presidential election was marred by rampant ballot-box stuffing. (Hamid Karzai was declared the winner in November.)
2009	The only man convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 returned home to Libya after his release from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds.