Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Local

July 18, 1990: U.S. Senate candidate Paul Wellstone walked the picket line with striking registered nurses at Naeve hospital.

Wellstone said, “Nurses are not in their profession to become millionaires. They’re in the profession to take care of people. But they did not sign a poverty vow and they do want to be treated with dignity.”

July 17, 1990: Duane Blankenship, Josh Peterson, Eric Fynbo and Bill Fynbo were pictured in the Tribune with the six trophies they won at the Open Karate Championships at the National Guard Armory in Albert Lea.

A metal sculpture representing Education Plus Time Equals Excellence was dedicated at Albert Lea Technical College. The sculpture was designed by ALTC industrial maintenance instructor Wayne Christenson.

 

National

July 13, 2013: A jury in Sanford, Florida, cleared neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman of all charges in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed Black teenager whose killing unleashed furious debate over racial profiling, self-defense and equal justice.

2007: Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick was indicted by a federal grand jury in Richmond, Virginia, on charges related to competitive dogfighting. (Vick later admitted bankrolling the dogfighting operation and helping to kill six to eight dogs; he served 23 months in federal custody, the last 60 days in home confinement.)

2001: Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant tortured in a New York City police station, agreed to an $8.7 million settlement with the city and its police union.

1999: John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, died when their single-engine plane, piloted by Kennedy, plunged into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

1997: Fashion designer Gianni Versace, 50, was shot dead outside his Miami Beach home; suspected gunman Andrew Phillip Cunanan, 27, was found dead eight days later, a suicide. (Investigators believed Cunanan killed four other people before Versace in a cross-country rampage that began the previous March.)

1985: “Live Aid,” an international rock concert in London, Philadelphia, Moscow and Sydney, took place to raise money for Africa’s starving people.

1975: Three American astronauts blasted off aboard an Apollo spaceship hours after two Soviet cosmonauts were launched aboard a Soyuz spacecraft for a mission that included a linkup of the two ships in orbit.

1974: The Senate Watergate Committee proposed sweeping reforms in an effort to prevent another Watergate scandal.

1973: Former presidential aide Alexander P. Butterfield revealed to Senate Watergate Committee staff members the existence of President Richard Nixon’s secret White House taping system. (Butterfield’s public revelation came three days later.)

July 12, 1967: Rioting erupted in Newark, New Jersey, over the police beating of a Black taxi driver; 26 people were killed in the five days of violence that followed.

July 16, 1945: The United States exploded its first experimental atomic bomb in the desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico; the same day, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis left Mare Island Naval Shipyard in California on a secret mission to deliver atomic bomb components to Tinian Island in the Marianas.

1945: Following Nazi Germany’s surrender, President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill began meeting at Potsdam in the final Allied summit of World War II.