- 180th Day of 2012 / 186 Remaining
- 86 Days Until Autumn Begins
- Sunrise:5:50
- Sunset:8:36
- 14 Hours 46 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:3:19pm
- Moon Set:1:23am
- Moon’s Phase: 68 %
- The Next Full Moon
- July 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:6:53am/6:41pm
- Low:12:45am/12:01pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:15.80
- Last Year:28.51
- Normal To Date:23>80
- Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80
- Holidays
- National Columnist's Day
- National Tapioca Day
- Long Letter Day
- National Try to Find A Pear Sherbet Recipe Day
- National Handshake Day
- Constitution Day-Ukraine
- On This Day In …
- 1778 --- Mary "Molly Pitcher" Hays McCauley, wife of an American artilleryman, carried water to the soldiers during the Battle of Monmouth and took her husband's place at his gun after he was overcome with heat.
- 1887 --- Coca-Cola syrup and extract were patented.
- 1894 --- The U.S. Congress made Labor Day a U.S. national holiday.
- 1902 --- The U.S. Congress passed the Spooner bill, it authorized a canal to be built across the isthmus of Panama.
- 1907 --- The Washington Nationals stole 13 bases in a single baseball game against the New York Highlanders. The New York catcher, incidentally, fared far better as a baseball executive in later years. That catcher became baseball commissioner Branch Rickey.
- 1919 --- With the signing of The Treaty of Versailles, World War I ended - exactly five years after it began.
- 1937 --- In a poll conducted by a New York City newspaper, players for the Giants, Yankees and Dodgers said they opposed the proposed baseball players’ union.
- 1944 --- The Alan Young Show debuted on NBC radio. It was a summer replacement for the popular Eddie Cantor. The show became a regular in the fall NBC lineup. Young, incidentally, made the switch to TV in 1961. He became a CBS star with a talking horse, of course, of course, named Mister Ed.
- 1960 --- In Cuba, Fidel Castro confiscated American-owned oil refineries without compensation.
- 1964 --- Malcolm X founded the Organization for Afro American Unity to seek independence for blacks in the Western Hemisphere.
- 1969 --- Just after 3 a.m., a police raid of the Stonewall Inn--a gay club located on New York City's Christopher Street--turns violent as patrons and local sympathizers begin rioting against the police. Although the police were legally justified in raiding the club, which was serving liquor without a license among other violations, New York's gay community had grown weary of the police department targeting gay clubs, a majority of which had already been closed. The crowd on the street watched quietly as Stonewall's employees were arrested, but when three drag queens and a lesbian were forced into the paddy wagon, the crowd began throwing bottles at the police. The officers were forced to take shelter inside the establishment, and two policemen were slightly injured before reinforcements arrived to disperse the mob. The protest, however, spilled over into the neighboring streets, and order was not restored until the deployment of New York's riot police. The so-called Stonewall Riot was followed by several days of demonstrations in New York and was the impetus for the formation of the Gay Liberation Front as well as other gay, lesbian, and bisexual civil rights organizations. It is also regarded by many as history's first major protest on behalf of equal rights for homosexuals.
- 1971 --- The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the draft evasion conviction of Muhammad Ali.
- 1975 --- At the Western Open in Illinois, golfer Lee Trevino was struck by lightening, but survived.
- 1975 --- David Bowie's "Fame" was released.
- 1976 --- Detroit Tiger pitcher Mark ‘The Bird’ Fidrych was called “...the most interesting player since Dizzy Dean” on ABC’s nationally televised coverage of a Tigers-Yankees match-up. The 21-year-old rookie sensation led the Tigers past the Yankees and made the All-Star team two weeks after the TV appearance.
- 1976 --- Women entered the Air Force Academy for the first time on this day. President Gerald R. Ford had actually opened the door by signed legislation [Oct 7, 1975] allowing women to enter the nation’s military academies. The first Air Force Academy class with women graduated in May 1980.
- 1992 --- Two of the strongest earthquakes ever to hit California strike the desert area east of Los Angeles on this day in 1992. Although the state sits upon the immense San Andreas fault line, relatively few major earthquakes have hit California in modern times. Two of the strongest, but not the deadliest, hit southern California on a single morning in the summer of 1992. Just before 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning, a 7.3-magnitude quake struck in Landers, 100 miles east of Los Angeles. Because the Landers area is sparsely populated, damage was relatively minor given the intensity of the jolt. In Los Angeles, residents experienced rolling and shaking for nearly a minute. The tremors were also felt in Arizona, Las Vegas and as far away as Boise, Idaho. Just over three hours later, a second 6.3-magnitude tremor hit in Big Bear, not too far from the original epicenter. This quake caused fires to break out and cost three people their lives. A chimney fell on a 3-year-old child and two people suffered fatal heart attacks. Between the two quakes, 400 people were injured and $92 million in damages were suffered. The physical damage was also significant. The quakes triggered landslides that wiped out roads and opened a 44-mile-long rupture in the earth, the biggest in California since the 1906 San Francisco quake.
- 1994 --- The U.S. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) announced it would begin experimenting with a UV (ultraviolet) Index, “To enhance public awareness of the effects of overexposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays, and to provide the public with actions they can take to reduce harmful effects of overexposure, which may include skin cancer, cataracts and immune suppression.”
- 1996 --- The Citadel, which had fought to keep one woman from enrolling as a cadet in its all-male military academy in 1993, abruptly ended its opposition to enrolling qualified female cadets. The change of policy happened after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a similar all-male policy at the Virginia Military Institute was unconstitutional. The court said the school could not refuse to accept women while receiving federal or state tax dollars. Had the Citadel decided to retain its 153-year-old men-only policy, it would have lost public tax dollars.
- 1997 --- The headlines screamed: “Fight Bites into MGM Earnings,” “Bit Part for Tyson,” “It’s The Bite Of The Ear”, “Pay-Per-Chew Bout,” and the one that said it all, “Tyson Disqualified After Ripping Piece of Holyfield’s Ear.” Needless to say (but we will anyway), Evander Holyfield retained his World Boxing Association heavyweight championship after Mike Tyson was disqualified for biting Holyfield, not once, but twice. The Nevada Athletic Commission revoked Mike Tyson’s boxing license for a year and fined him $3 million.
- 2001 --- Slobodan Milosevic was taken into custody and was handed over to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. The indictment charged Milosevic and four other senior officials, with crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war in Kosovo.
- 2004 --- The Supreme Court ruled that enemy combatants can challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
- 2007 --- The American bald eagle was removed from the endangered species list.
- 2010 --- The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Americans have the right to own a gun for self-defense anywhere they live.
- Birthdays
- Mel Brooks
- Gilda Radner
- Henry VIII
- Noriyuki 'Pat' Morita
- John Elway
- Kathy Bates
- Mary Stuart Masterson
- Richard Rodgers
- John Cusack
- Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
- John Byner
- Kathy Bates
- Peter Paul Rubens
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- John Dillinger