August 12th

Today's Highlight in History:
On August 12th, 1960, the first balloon satellite -- the "Echo One" -- was launched by the United States from Cape Canaveral.

On this date:
In 1851, Isaac Singer was granted a patent on his sewing machine.

In 1867, President Andrew Johnson sparked a move to impeach him as he defied Congress by suspending Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.

In 1898, the peace protocol ending the Spanish-American War was signed.

In 1898, Hawaii was formally annexed to the United States.

In 1944, Joseph P. Kennedy Junior, eldest son of Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, was killed with his co-pilot when their explosives-laden Navy plane blew up over England.

In 1953, the Soviet Union conducted a secret test of its first hydrogen bomb.

In 1972, the last American combat ground troops left Vietnam.

In 1985, the world's worst single-aircraft disaster occurred as a crippled Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 on a domestic flight crashed into a mountain, killing 520 people.

In 1994, Woodstock '94 opened in Saugerties, New York.

In 1998, Swiss banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion as restitution to Holocaust survivors to settle claims for their assets.

Ten years ago: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sought to tie any withdrawal of his troops from Kuwait to an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Air Force Staff Sergeant John Campisi of West Covina, California, died after being hit by a military truck in Saudi Arabia, becoming the first US casualty of the Persian Gulf crisis.

Five years ago: In a methodical, daylong procession, Republican presidential candidates courted Ross Perot's followers at a United We Stand America conference in Dallas.

One year ago: Los Angeles County prosecutors charged white supremacist Buford O. Furrow with murder and five counts of attempted murder, all filed as hate crimes, in the wounding of five people at a Jewish community center and the shooting death of a Filipino-American mail carrier. (Federal prosecutors already had charged Furrow in the postman's slaying.)

"Regrets are as personal as fingerprints."

-- Margaret Culkin Banning, American writer (1891-1982).