Today in history for August 23, 2011

Published 11:00 am Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Today is Tuesday, Aug. 23, the 235th day of 2011. There are 130 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On Aug. 23, 1775, Britain’s King George III proclaimed the American colonies to be in a state of “open and avowed rebellion.”

On this date:

In 1305, Scottish rebel leader Sir William Wallace was executed by the English for treason.

In 1754, France’s King Louis XVI was born at Versailles (vehr-SY’).

In 1914, Japan declared war against Germany in World War I.

In 1926, silent film star Rudolph Valentino died in New York at age 31.

In 1927, amid protests, Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston for the murders of two men during a 1920 robbery.

In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in Moscow.

In 1944, Romanian prime minister Ion Antonescu was dismissed by King Michael, paving the way for Romania to abandon the Axis in favor of the Allies.

In 1960, Broadway librettist Oscar Hammerstein (HAM’-ur-STYN’) II, 65, died in Doylestown, Pa.

In 1973, a bank robbery-turned-hostage-taking began in Stockholm, Sweden; the four hostages ended up empathizing with their captors, a psychological condition now referred to as “Stockholm Syndrome.”

In 1989, in a case that inflamed racial tensions in New York, Yusuf Hawkins, a 16-year-old black youth, was shot dead after he and his friends were confronted by a group of white youths in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.

Ten years ago:

Rep. Gary Condit, D-Calif., interviewed by Connie Chung on ABC, denied any involvement in the disappearance of Washington intern Chandra Levy. (Ingmar Guandique, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, was convicted in Nov. 2010 of murdering Levy, and was sentenced to 60 years in prison.) Thierry Devaux, a Frenchman using a motor-driven parachute, was rescued and arrested after becoming snagged on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. NATO soldiers streamed into Macedonia as part of a mission to help end six months of ethnic hostilities by collecting and destroying rebel weapons.

Five years ago:

A previously unknown militant group released the first video of two Fox News journalists who’d been kidnapped in Gaza. (Reporter Steve Centanni and cameraman Olaf Wiig were later freed.) The Citadel released the results of a survey in which almost 20 percent of female cadets reported being sexually assaulted since enrolling at the South Carolina military college. Jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson died in Ventura, Calif., at age 78.

One year ago:

A dismissed policeman armed with an automatic rifle seized a bus in the Philippine capital with 25 people on board, mostly Hong Kong tourists; the gunman released nine of the hostages and demanded his job back to free the rest. (The hijacking lasted 11 hours before the gunman opened fire on his hostages; a Manila SWAT team then killed the hostage-taker, but not before eight tourists also died.) A jury in Goldsboro, N.C., convicted former Marine Cesar Laurean of first-degree murder in the death of a pregnant colleague, Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach. (Laurean was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.) Tiger Woods and his wife, Elin Nordegren, officially divorced.