Today July 25 in history

 Today July 25 in history

* In 1866, Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army of the United States, the first officer to hold the rank.

* In 1946, the United States detonated an atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device.

* In 1972, the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment came to light as The Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service, in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been allowing poor, rural Black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even allowing them to die, as a way of studying the disease.

* In 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the first “test tube baby,” was born in Oldham, England; she’d been 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 countries’ 46-year-old formal state of war.

* In 2010, the online whistleblower Wikileaks posted some 90,000 leaked U.S. military records that amounted to a blow-by-blow account of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.

* In 2016, on the opening night of the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia, Bernie Sanders robustly embraced former rival Hillary Clinton as a champion for the economic causes that enlivened his supporters, signaling for them to rally behind her in the campaign against Republican Donald Trump. 

* In 2017, a bitterly-divided Senate voted to move forward with Republican legislation to repeal and replace “Obamacare.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz,), returning to the Capitol for the first time since he was diagnosed with brain cancer, cast a decisive “yes” vote.  (Three days later, McCain joined two Republicans and Democrats in defeating the repeal effort.) 

* In 2017, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, (R-La.) who was critically wounded in a shooting at a baseball practice June 14, was released from a Washington hospital. 

* In 2019, President Donald Trump had a second phone call with the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during which he solicited Zelenskyy’s help in gathering potentially damaging information about former VP Joe Biden. (The AP 07/25/23)