- 165th Day of 2012 / 201 Remaining
- 7 Days Until Summer Begins
- Sunrise:5:47
- Sunset:8:33
- 14 Hours 46 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:1:59am
- Moon Set:3:29pm
- Moon’s Phase: 28 %
- The Next Full Moon
- June 3 @ 11:51am
- Full Buck Moon
- Full Thunder Moon
- Full Hay Moon
July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur. It was also often called the Full Thunder Moon, for the reason that thunderstorms are most frequent during this time. Another name for this month’s Moon was the Full Hay Moon.
- Tides
- High:7:48am/7:27pm
- Low:1:47am/12:56pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:15.80
- Last Year:28.51
- Normal To Date:23.75
- Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80
- Holidays
- Kitchen Klutzes of America Day
- Commemoration Day-Kyrgyzstan
- Vincent's Day-Germany
- St. Anthony's Day-Portugal
- On This Day In …
- 323BC --- Alexander the Great, conqueror of the entire known world, died of a fever in Babylon at age 33. Taken to Egypt, his body was preserved in honey until centuries later when Caligula desecrated the tomb.
- 1777 --- The Marquis de Lafayette arrived in the American colonies to help with their rebellion against the British.
- 1789 --- Mrs. Alexander Hamilton served a new dessert treat for General George Washington. The highlight of the dinner party was ice cream!
- 1825 --- Walter Hunt patented the safety pin. Hunt then then sold the rights for $400.
- 1866 --- The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed by the U.S. Congress. It was ratified on July 9, 1868. The amendment was designed to grant citizenship to and protect the civil liberties of recently freed slaves. It did this by prohibiting states from denying or abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, depriving any person of his life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or denying to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
- 1888 --- The U.S. Congress created the Department of Labor.
- 1900 --- China's Boxer Rebellion against foreigners and Chinese Christians erupted.
- 1920 --- The U.S. Post Office Department ruled that children may not be sent by parcel post.
- 1922 --- Charlie Osborne started the longest attack on hiccups. He hiccuped over 435 million times before stopping. He died in 1991, 11 months after his hiccups ended.
- 1944 --- The wire recorder was patented by Marvin Camras. Wire recorders were the precursor of much easier to use magnetic tape recorders.
- 1966 --- The Miranda Decision was handed down by the United States Supreme Court. The 5-4 decision regarded the rights of individuals to remain silent because “...anything you say, can and will be used against you in a court of law.” It held that the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States “required warnings before valid statements could be taken by police.” If you are held for questioning, you will hear police read you your rights or read you the Miranda, the more common reference to the Miranda Decision. The card imprinted with the Miranda Decision, and carried by the police, put some money in the pockets of then, 23-year-old Ernesto Miranda. The subject of Miranda vs. Arizona, he signed the cards, selling his autograph. Some ten years later, a man, suspected of stabbing Miranda to death during a card game, was released after being read his Miranda rights. A warrant was later issued for his arrest; but he was never seen again. Without notifying suspects of their Miranda Rights, law enforcement in the U.S. has little basis for prosecution. What a criminal defendant says if not informed, before being questioned, that he/she has the right to remain silent and speak with an attorney or other legal counsel present, will not be admitted in court.
- 1967 --- President Lyndon Johnson appoints U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Thurgood Marshall to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Tom C. Clark. On August 30, after a heated debate, the Senate confirmed Marshall's nomination by a vote of 69 to 11. Two days later, he was sworn in by Chief Justice Earl Warren, making him the first African American in history to sit on America's highest court. The great-grandson of slaves, Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1908. In 1933, after studying under the tutelage of civil liberties lawyer Charles H. Houston, he received his law degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1936, he joined the legal division of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), of which Houston was director, and two years later succeeded his mentor in the organization's top legal post.
- 1969 --- Mick Taylor joined The Rolling Stones as Brian Jones' replacement.
- 1971 --- The New York Times begins publishing portions of the 47-volume Pentagon analysis of how the U.S. commitment in Southeast Asia grew over a period of three decades. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who had become an antiwar activist, had stolen the documents. After unsuccessfully offering the documents to prominent opponents of the war in the U.S. Senate, Ellsberg gave them to the Times. Officially called The History of the U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam, the "Pentagon Papers" disclosed closely guarded communiques, recommendations, and decisions concerning the U.S. military role in Vietnam during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, along with the diplomatic phase in the Eisenhower years. The publication of the papers created a nationwide furor, with congressional and diplomatic reverberations as all branches of the government debated over what constituted "classified" material and how much should be made public. The publication of the documents precipitated a crucial legal battle over "the people's right to know," and led to an extraordinary session of the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the issue. Although the documents were from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, President Richard Nixon opposed their publication, both to protect the sources in highly classified appendices, and to prevent further erosion of public support for the war. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled that the Times had the right to publish the material. The publication of the "Pentagon Papers," along with previous suspected disclosures of classified information to the press, led to the creation of a White House unit to plug information leaks to journalists. The illegal activities of the unit, known as the "Plumbers," and their subsequent cover-up, became known collectively as the "Watergate scandal," which resulted in President Nixon's resignation in August 1974.
- 1983 --- After more than a decade in space, Pioneer 10, the world's first outer-planetary probe, leaves the solar system. The next day, it radioed back its first scientific data on interstellar space. On March 2, 1972, the NASA spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to Jupiter, the solar system's largest planet. In December 1973, after successfully negotiating the asteroid belt and a distance of 620 million miles, Pioneer 10 reached Jupiter and sent back to Earth the first close-up images of the spectacular gas giant. On June 13, 1983, the NASA spacecraft left the solar system. NASA officially ended the Pioneer 10 project on March 31, 1997, with the spacecraft having traveled a distance of some six billion miles. Headed in the direction of the Taurus constellation, Pioneer 10 will pass within three light years of another star--Ross 246--in the year 34,600 A.D. Bolted to the probe's exterior wall is a gold-anodized plaque, 6 by 9 inches in area, that displays a drawing of a human man and woman, a star map marked with the location of the sun, and another map showing the flight path of Pioneer 10. The plaque, intended for intelligent life forms elsewhere in the galaxy, was designed by astronomer Carl Sagan.
- 1985 --- A Doonesbury cartoon strip took a shot at Frank Sinatra by portraying the ‘Chairman of the Board’ as a friend of organized crime; the Mafia, in fact. Several of the over 800 newspapers that carried the strip by cartoonist, Garry Trudeau, carried the comic strip panel with a disclaimer.
- 1991 --- An Atlanta firm paid $2.4-million for an original copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence in New York. A flea market buff had found the document stuffed in the frame of a $4.00 painting.
- 1994 --- A jury in Anchorage, Alaska, blamed recklessness by Exxon Corp. and Capt. Joseph Hazelwood for the Exxon Valdez disaster, allowing victims of the nation's worst oil spill to seek $15 billion in damages.
- Birthdays
- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon
- William Butler Yeats
- Ally Sheedy
- Hannah Storm
- Elizabeth Schumann
- Red Grange
- Bettina Bunge
- Malcolm McDowell
- Richard Thomas
- Tim Allen
- Mary-Kate Olsen,
- Ashley Olsen
- Luis Alvarez
- Doc Cheatham
- Ralph Edwards
- Paul Lynde
- Siegfried
- Basil Rathbone
- Vieira da Silva