This Day in History

By The Standard Staff - 08/20/2007

Today Monday, Aug. 20, the 232nd day of 2007. There are 133 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight: In 1968, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations began invading Czechoslovakia to crush the ‘‘Prague Spring’’ liberalization drive of Alexander Dubcek’s regime.

On this date: In 1833, Benjamin Harrison, 23rd president of the United States, was born in North Bend, Ohio.

In 1920, pioneering American radio station 8MK in Detroit (later WWJ) began daily broadcasting.

In 1953, the Soviet Union publicly acknowledged it had tested a hydrogen bomb.

In 1977, the U.S. launched Voyager 2, an unmanned spacecraft carrying a 12-inch copper phonograph record containing greetings in dozens of languages, samples of music and sounds of nature.

Birthdays Writer-producer-director Walter Bernstein is 88. Singer-musician Isaac Hayes is 65. Broadcast journalist Connie Chung is 61. Rock singer Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin) is 59. TV weatherman Al Roker is 53. Actor Jay Acovone is 52. Actress Joan Allen is 51. Rock singer Fred Durst (Limp Bizkit) is 37.

Worth repeating ...

‘‘Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.’’

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian author