June 22

June 22 (Historic & Scientific Events)

Happy Anti-Fascism Day! (Croatia); Anti-fascism Day in Croatia; 1941;

june 22, 1999; study proves that rats can use brain power to move robotic devices;

No Panties Day. Free ball’n day. Going commando day.

Kodak stops selling 35mm film, June 22, 2009;
June 22, 2011; President Barack Obama announced he would pull home 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by the following summer.
Charon, the moon of the asteroid Pluto, formerly a planet, was discovered;
the Battle of Algiers begins;
1977; Former Attorney General John N. Mitchell began serving a sentence for his role in the Watergate cover-up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Mitchell#Watergate_scandal
FDR signs the GI Bill into law;
The Pledge of Allegiance is established;
Nixon lowered the voting age to 18;
1941; Hitler invades Russia;
Galileo Is convicted of high blasphemy against the Catholic Church & the Pope for finding those moons circling Jupiter;
the Sears Tower Skydeck opened, 1974;;;
the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, 1969.

the Greenwich Observatory was commissioned by Charles the 2nd, 1675;
Checkpoint Charlie is dismantled;
Justice Department was created by Ulysses S Grant in 1870, June 22;
Henry Hudson is overthrown by a mutiny, never to be seen ever again;
Napoleon abdicates for the 2nd time, forever banished, until his death, to never return to history again!
the Supreme Court defends Henry Miller’s free speech with his book “Tropic of Cancer”, which, because of the Supreme Court, is now classic literature;
Arkansas is the first Southern state readmitted back to the Union after the Civil War;

J. Edgar Hoover labels John Dillinger as Public Enemy #1, June 22, 1934;;;

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In 1675, the Royal Greenwich Observatory was created by Royal Warrant in England by Charles II;;; June 22, 1675; The observatory was commissioned in 1675 by King Charles II, on June 22, 1675;;; with the foundation stone being laid on 10 August;;; In 1767 the observatory began publishing The Nautical Almanac, which established the longitude of Greenwich as a baseline for time calculations. The Greenwich Observatory’s primary uses were in practical astronomy - navigation, timekeeping, determination of star positions. The almanac's popularity among navigators led in part to the adoption (1884) of the Greenwich meridian as the Earth's prime meridian (0° longitude) and the international time zones.
Greenwich is a district in southeastern London. The prime meridian is based at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich in London in 1851. By 1884, over two-thirds of all ships and tonnage used it as the reference meridian on their charts and maps. In October of that year, at the behest of U.S. President Chester A. Arthur, that dude with the funky beard, 41 delegates from 25 nations met in Washington, D.C., United States, for the International Meridian Conference. This conference selected the meridian passing through Greenwich as the official prime meridian due to its popularity. However, France abstained from the vote, and French maps continued to use the Paris meridian for several decades.
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AND!

June 22. No panty day. Free ball’n!!! I don’t know why, or who started this, but google no panty day, and there’s lots of pictures saying it. Viva Alia Al-Mahdy!

June 22, 1969 – The Cuyahoga River catches fire in Cleveland, Ohio, drawing national attention to water pollution, and spurring the passing of the Clean Water Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jxV6BbREfY At least 13 fires have been reported on the Cuyahoga River, the first occurring in 1868. The largest river fire in 1952 caused over $1 million in damage to boats, a bridge, and a riverfront office building. On June 22, 1969, a river fire captured the attention of Time magazine, which described the Cuyahoga as the river that "oozes rather than flows" and in which a person "does not drown but decays"; The 1969 Cuyahoga River fire helped spur an avalanche of water pollution control activities, resulting in the Clean Water Act, Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, and the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA).

President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA and it began operation on December 2, 1970, after Nixon signed an executive order.

In 1999, the first demonstration of brain signals from live rat directly controlling a robot arm was published by Nature Neuroscience. The research was hailed as a breakthrough by other scientists working to combine computing with biology. Researchers from MCP Hahnemann University medical school and Duke University taught laboratory rats to operate a water-dispensing robot by thought alone. Their aim is to restore movement to patients who are paralyzed or have had limbs amputated. At first, the robot was controlled by the rat pressing a lever and researchers identified the corresponding brain activity. Then the robot was linked to a computer interpreting the rats' brain signals. The rats gained water merely by thinking about pawing the lever.

June 22, 1815. Napoleon Bonaparte abdicated a second time, after the Battle of Waterloo, falling into the ashheap of history, never to return again. Fuck that racist anti-revolutionary imperialist asswipe, & everybody who speaks good about that cornflake.

June 22, 2009. Eastman Kodak Company announced that it would discontinue sales of the Kodachrome Color Film, citing declining demand. I remember a day when we had to wait a week or two to get our 24 pictures developed, after turning the roll of 35mm film in, at some pharmacy or grocery store. Those rolls of film were called Kodachrome. At least some of them were. Fujifilm Fujichrome and Kodak Ektachrome replaced them...;;; Kodachrome is a brand name for a non-substantive, color reversal film introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1935.
So that’s a victory for post-modernism. When you have a digital camera, that can be printed at home, why invest in those expensive Kodak pictures, with the shitty quality?

June 22, 1974. In Chicago, the Sears Tower Skydeck opened, and they have all glass balconies; (now called the Willis Tower). The building is considered a seminal achievement for its architect Fazlur Rahman Khan.The Willis Tower is the second-tallest building in the United States and the 16th-tallest in the world. More than one million people visit its observation deck each year, making it one of Chicago's most popular tourist destinations. The structure was renamed in 2009 by the Willis Group as part of its lease on a portion of the tower's space. As of December 2013, the building's largest tenant is United Airlines, which moved its corporate headquarters from the United Building at 77 West Wacker Drive in 2012 and today occupies around 20 floors with its headquarters and operations center. The building's official address is 233 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60606.

The 828-metre (2,717 ft) tall Burj Khalifa in Dubai has been the world's tallest building since 2008

June 22, 1934 John Dillinger is informally named America's first Public Enemy Number One.

John Herbert Dillinger, abused by his father, (/dɪlɪndʒər/; June 22, 1903 – July 22, 1934) was an American gangster in the Depression-era United States. his German grandfather, Matthias Dillinger, emigrated to the United States in 1851 from Metz, in the region of Lorraine, then under French sovereignty. When much of Amerika was drowning in debt, Dillinger was taking matters into his own hands. John Dillinger operated with a group of men known as the Dillinger Gang, which was accused of robbing 24 banks and four police stations, among other activities. Dillinger escaped from jail twice. He was also charged with, but never convicted of, the murder of an East Chicago, Indiana, police officer who shot Dillinger in his bullet-proof vest during a shootout, prompting him to return fire; despite his infamy, it was Dillinger's only homicide charge.FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover developed a more sophisticated Bureau as a weapon against organized crime, using Dillinger and his gang as his campaign platform. On July 22, 1934, the police and the Division of Investigation closed in on the Biograph Theater. Federal agents, led by Melvin Purvis and Samuel P. Cowley, moved to arrest Dillinger as he exited the theater. He drew a Colt Model 1908 Vest Pocket and attempted to flee, but was killed

1944 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs into law the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill. the goal was to provide immediate rewards for practically all World War II veterans. It avoided the highly disputed postponed "cash bonus" payout for World War I veterans that caused political turmoil for a decade and a half after that war. Benefits included dedicated payments of tuition and living expenses to attend high school, college or vocational/technical school, low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans to start a business, as well as one year of unemployment compensation. It was available to all veterans who had been on active duty during the war years for at least 90 days and had not been dishonorably discharged—exposure to combat was not required. By 1956, roughly 8.8 million veterans had used the G.I. Bill education benefits, some 2.2 million to attend colleges or universities and an additional 5.6 million for some kind of training program.



June 22, 1964. The U.S. Supreme Court voted that Henry Miller's book, "Tropic of Cancer", could not be banned. Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” controversial lines:
 Tropic of Cancer. He lays out his objective on the very first page: “This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will.” The novel was banned in the US for 27 years, although you could snag a copy in Paris from 1934 onward. The ban was eventually overturned because, like fellow banned books Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the court ruled the novel was literature, not pornography. The result was that the Brooklyn-raised Miller was nearly 70 years old when his first novel was finally published in his home country.
“Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.” 
“You can forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn't have to have brains. They're better without brains. But an old cunt, even if she's brilliant, even if she's the most charming woman in the world, nothing makes any difference. A young cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss. All they can do for you is buy you things. But that doesn't put meat on their arms or juice between their legs.” 
“What do you want of me? When I have something to say, I put it in print. When I have something to give, I give it. Your prying curiosity turns my stomach! Your compliments humiliate me! Your tea poisons me! I owe nothing to any one. I would be responsible to God alone―if He existed!” 
Miller with Anais Nin in 1974;;; “O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt.



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I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent. Your Sylvester is a little jealous now? He feels something, does he? He feels the remnants of my big prick. I have set the shores a little wider, I have ironed out the wrinkles. After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. You can shit arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across your naval. I am fucking you, Tania, so that you’ll stay fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris’ chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces. . . . “
“In the lavatory I stand before the bowl with a tremendous erection; it seems light and heavy at the same time, like a piece of lead with wings on it. And while I’m standing there like that two cunts sail in – Americans. I greet them cordially, prick in hand. They give me a wink and pass on. In the vestibule, as I’m buttoning my fly, I notice one of them waiting for her friend to come out of the can. The music is still playing and maybe Mona’ll be coming to fetch me, or Borowski with his gold-knobbed cane, but I’m in her arms now and she has hold of me and I don’t care who comes or what happens. We wriggle into the cabinet and there I stand her up, slap up against the wall, and I try to get it into her but it won’t work and so we sit down on the seat and try it that way but it won’t work either. No matter how we try it it won’t work. And all the while she’s got hold of my prick, she’s clutching it like a lifesaver, but it’s no use, we’re too hot, too eager. The music is still playing and so we waltz out of the cabinet into the vestibule again and as we’re dancing there in the shithouse I come all over her beautiful gown and she’s sore as hell about it. I stumble back to the table and there’s Borowski with his ruddy face and Mona with her disapproving eye. And Borowski says ‘Let’s all go to Brussels tomorrows,’ and we agree, and when we get back to the hotel I vomit all over the place, in the bed, in the washbowl, over the suits and gowns and the galoshes and canes and the notebooks I never touched and the manuscripts cold and dead. “
“Words are loneliness.”
“I have found God, but he is insufficient.”

“Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.”

June 22, 1942. The Pledge of Allegiance formally adopted by US Congress;;; I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Ohio and Texas adopted state flag pledges of allegiance to be recited after this national one; “under God” would be added in 1954 by the Catholic Knights of Columbus signed by Dwight D Eisenhower, because of the Cold War against the “godless Russians”. I’m mixed on the pledge of allegiance, because while it’s bullshit to be forced to worship a piece of cloth, which all freedom loving Americans should understand, the Bellamy salutes are identical to Nazi salutes; there’s old pictures of American children giving the Nazi salute to the American flag; that’s the Bellamy salute; Francis Bellamy was a Baptist minister’s son from upstate NY, educated in public schools, and he was a Christian Socialist. But Francis Bellamy was a Christian Socialist. Wikipedia said that The Pledge was originally composed by Colonel George Balch in 1887, & then later revised by Francis Bellamy in 1892;;; before being formally adopted by Congress as the pledge in 1942.

June 22, 1990 – Checkpoint Charlie is dismantled in Berlin.Although the wall was opened in November 1989 and the checkpoint booth removed on June 22, 1990, the checkpoint remained an official crossing for foreigners and diplomats until German reunification during October 1990 when the guard house was removed; it is now on display in the open-air museum of the Allied Museum in Berlin-Zehlendorf. There’s a reason why Germany blends socialism & capitalism better than us, and excels in both, so they are better at socialism & capitalism than the US is, and that reason is because, ½ of their country used to be 100% communist, and the other half, 100% capitalist.

June 22, 1839. Cherokee leaders Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot are assassinated for signing the Treaty of New Echota, which had resulted in the Trail of Tears. The Trail of Tears happened because of Andrew Jackson. 2 – 6,000 Cherokee natives died in the Trail of Tears.

In the West, the Ross faction blamed Ridge and the other signers of the Treaty of New Echota for the 4,000 deaths along the trail in the Removal as well as the loss of communal lands. In June 1839, Major Ridge, his son John, and nephew Elias Boudinot, were executed in accordance with the Cherokee Blood Law by Cherokee of the Ross faction. They tried to kill Elias' brother Stand Watie, but he survived; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8o0heHXQF8

June 22, 1868. Arkansas was re-admitted to the Union... why!?!

Arkansas became the first breakaway state to be readmitted to the Union. It happened on this day in 1868. The Reconstruction Act outlined the terms for readmission of the onetime rebel states. The measure divided the former Confederate states, save for Tennessee, into five military districts. It was enacted on March 2, 1867, after Congress had overridden President Andrew Johnson’s veto. It required each former Confederate state to write a new constitution that needed to be approved by a majority of state voters, including newly emancipated African-Americans, before being considered for representation in Congress. In addition, each state was required to ratify the 13th Amendment and 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Before Congress acted, the Arkansas Legislature, dominated by Radical Republicans, had established universal male suffrage while disenfranchising former Confederates, mostly Democrats. It also enacted a free universal public education system. Nevertheless, racial violence ensued as the U.S. Army and the state militia battled the Ku Klux Klan, comprising mainly former Confederates. Powell Clayton, a Union general who had returned to Arkansas after the war, was elected governor. Clayton kept the former Confederates from regaining political power. His opponents painted him and his allies as carpetbaggers since many gubernatorial appointees were former northerners. Clayton also raised taxes. By the end of Reconstruction, railroads laid 662 miles of track with $9 million (the equivalent of $193 million in current dollars) in state assistance. On May 6, 1861, Arkansas had been the ninth state to join the Confederate States of America. Unlike South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas, Arkansas waited until after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in Charleston Harbor on April 12, and President Abraham Lincoln’s subsequent call for troops on April 15, before taking action.

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June 22 Holiday. Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Great Patriotic War (Belarus), Russia & Ukraine; In Belarus, heroic defenders of Brest Fortress are honored on this day. It began on June 22, 1941 with the Operation Barbarossa offensive. Nazi Germany violated the non-aggression 1939 Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union at dawn. Belarus became independent in 1991. 40% of Belarus is forested;;; 9.5 million; Belarus is the only European country to retain capital punishment in both law and practice; there’s also not much freedom there;

June 22, 1941; Hitler invades Soviet Union with Operation Barbarosa; which shows how stupid Hitler is; after Pearl Harbor, which was Japan attacking us, Hitler jumps in; that was totally unnecessary; he could have been like, “that was Japan”, not us, instead, he’s like fuck you USA; fuck you USSR; then Hitler challenged the Harlem Globetrotters in a game of basketball;; then Hitler challenged Bobby Fisher in a game of chess;; then he challenged Mark Walberg to a dickoff; this mfer is stupid!

(remember Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics!?! how badass was he!?!)

June 22, 1941; Hitler wanted to conquer the western Soviet Union so that it could be repopulated by Germans, to use Slavs as a slave labor force for the Axis war-effort, and to seize the oil reserves in the Caucacus (home of the name “Caucasians”) and the agricultural resources throughout the Soviet territories. "The Russian danger is... our danger," Winston Churchill said, "and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/22/newsid_3526000/3526691.stm

Croatia is a European country, populated with 4.3 million souls, who all have universal healthcare.

June 22 Holiday. Anti-Fascist Struggle Day (Croatia). Anti-Fascist Struggle Day is a national holiday and celebration in Croatia. It is celebrated on June 22, as it marks the beginning of the uprising of Croatian anti-fascist Partisans against German and Italian occupying forces, that started with the forming of the First Sisak People’s Liberation Partisan Detachment on June 22, 1941 near Sisak, Croatia. Brezovica Forest This first detachment of the Yugoslav Partisans was established in occupied Yugoslavia, in the Brezovica Forest near Sisak (in today's Croatia) on 22 June 1941, the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union. It had 79 members, mainly Croats with the exception of one notable Serb woman, Nada Dimić,[1] and was commanded by Vladimir Janjić-Capo. This event marked the start of armed anti-fascist resistance in occupied Yugoslavia. Today, June 22 is commemorated in Croatia every year as a public holiday called the Anti-Fascist Struggle Day. Janko Bobetko, who 50 years later became one of the most prominent Croatian generals in Croatian War of Independence, was one of the founding members of this unit;;; The central ceremony marking Anti-Fascist Struggle Day, which was marked on Sunday in Brezovica Forest, near Sisak, where the first armed antifascist unit - The Sisak Partisan Unit - was formed on 22 June 1941, was attended by numerous state delegations and representatives of the diplomatic corps in Croatia. the 1st Sisak Partisan Detachment - formed in Brezovica forest near Sisak on 22 June 1941. Of the 77 fighters who set up the first Partisan unit, 38 survived the war.

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June 22, 1978, James W. Christy and Robert S. Harrington discover the only known moon of Pluto: Charon. Though since Neil Degrasse Tyson downgraded the status of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet to some, asteroid to others, adds shadows of doubts to Charon’s role in our solar system.

previously unknown moon orbiting Pluto at a distance of about 19,600 kilometers (12,100 miles) with a period of 6.4 days. The moon was named Charon, after the boatman in Greek mythology who took the souls of the dead across the River Styx to Pluto's underworld.

Instead of being the only planet in its region, like the rest of the Solar System, Pluto and its moons are now known to be just a large example of a collection of objects called the Kuiper Belt;;; Astronomers had been turning up larger and larger objects in the Kuiper Belt.

In 2005, Mike Brown and his team dropped the bombshell. They had discovered an object, further out than the orbit of Pluto that was probably the same size, or even larger. Officially named 2003 UB313, the object was later designated as Eris. Since its discovery, astronomers have determined that Eris’ size is approximately 2,600 km (1,600 miles) across. It also has approximately 25% more mass than Pluto.

With Eris being larger, made of the same ice/rock mixture, and more massive than Pluto, the concept that we have nine planets in the Solar System began to fall apart. What is Eris, planet or Kuiper Belt Object; what is Pluto, a large asteroid?
In the end, astronomers voted for the controversial decision of demoting Pluto (and Eris) down to the newly created classification of “dwarf planet”.
Astronomers decided they would make a final decision about the definition of a planet at the XXVIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union, which was held from August 14 to August 25, 2006 in Prague, Czech Republic.

Is Pluto a planet? Does it qualify? For an object to be a planet, it needs to meet these three requirements defined by the IAU:

• It needs to be in orbit around the Sun – Yes, so maybe Pluto is a planet.
• It needs to have enough gravity to pull itself into a spherical shape – Pluto…check
• It needs to have “cleared the neighborhood” of its orbit – Uh oh. Here’s the rule breaker. According to this, Pluto is not a planet.
  

What does “cleared its neighborhood” mean? As planets form, they become the dominant gravitational body in their orbit in the Solar System. As they interact with other, smaller objects, they either consume them, or sling them away with their gravity.

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June 22, 1611; English explorer Henry Hudson, his teenage son John, and 7 crewmen were set adrift in a small shallop in present-day Hudson Bay by mutineers on the ship Discovery, & was never heard from again. Hudson Bay, Hudson River, & the Hudson Strait, all bare Henry Hudson’s namesake.

The mutineers provided the castaways with clothing, powder and shot, some pikes, an iron pot, some meal, and other miscellaneous items.

When the mutineers returned to England, they were tried for murder, but they were acquitted.

Henry Hudson and his marooned crewmates appear as mythic characters in the famous story "Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving.

June 22, 1638/1633?. Galileo is found guilty of heresy by the Catholic Church for his Copernican views, & Galileo is sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his ten years of life left. Galileo’s crime? Finding moons revolving around Jupiter. If the planets had moons revolving around them, then clearly, the heavenly bodies don’t all revolved around Earth. 1633. The Pope & the Holy Office of the Catholic Church in Rome forces Galileo Galilei to recant his view that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the Universe in the form he presented it in, after heated controversy.
Eventually, 350 years later, the Catholic Church admits that it was wrong on Oct 31 1992.

 In 1633, Galileo Galilei was forced by the Inquisition to “abjure, curse, and detest” his Copernican heliocentric views. “I, Galileo...do swear that I have always believed, do now believe and, with God's aid shall believe hereafter, all that which is taught and preached by the ... church. I must wholly forsake the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and moves not, and that the earth is not the center of the world and moves....” He was then condemned to the “formal prison of the Holy Office” for an undetermined amount of time which would be served at the pleasure of his judges, and required to repeat the seven penitential psalms once a week for three years. The next day the Pope specified the prison sentence should be house arrest.

June 22, 1973;;; Skylab astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific after a record 28 days in space.

1989 - The government of Angola and the anti-Communist rebels of the UNITA movement agreed to a formal truce in their 14-year-old civil war.

June 22-29, 1941;;; The June Uprising in Lithuania begins; Two of the major Lithuanian cities, Kaunas and Vilnius, fell into the hands of the rebels before the arrival of the Wehrmacht.

1945 - During World War II, the battle for Okinawa officially ended after 81 days/12 weeks; 1945; The World War II battle for Okinawa ended; 12,520 Americans and 110,000 Japanese were killed in the 83-day campaign.

June 22, 1956;;; decolonization war against France; The battle for Algiers began as three buildings in Casbah were blown up. The Capitol of Algeria, an extremely large African country, over 33 million souls; right underneath France & Portugal; North African country supplies large amounts of natural gas to Europe, and energy exports are the backbone of the economy. According to OPEC Algeria has the 16th largest oil reserves in the world and the second largest in Africa, while it has the 9th largest reserves of natural gas. Sonatrach, the national oil company, is the largest company in Africa. Algeria has one of the largest militaries in Africa and the largest defence budget on the continent; most of Algeria's weapons are imported from Russia, with whom they are a close ally.[13][14] Algeria is a member of the African Union, the Arab League, OPEC, the United Nations and is the founding member of the Maghreb Union.
1970 – Liberal U.S. President Richard Nixon signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making it more liberal, and lowing the voting age in the United States to be 18. Influenced by the draft of males at least 18 years of age to fight in the Vietnam War, Senator Ted Kennedy convinced Congress to add a provision guaranteeing citizens at least 18 years of age the right to vote in federal, state, and local elections.[2]:205–206 In a statement explaining his decision to sign the amendments, Nixon expressed doubts that this provision was constitutional, and he instructed the Attorney General to expedite litigation to test its constitutionality.[20] Later that year, the Supreme Court, in Oregon v. Mitchell (1970),[21] struck down the part of the provision lowering the voting age in state elections as unconstitutional; the Court upheld only the part of the provision that lowered the voting age in federal elections. The decision precipitated the ratification of the Twenty-sixth Amendment the following year, which lowered the voting age in all elections to 18
 In 1969, in America, oil-sodden floating debris on the Cuyahoga River ignited (perhaps by sparks from a passing train) and burned with flames reported up to five stories high. Although fire-fighters extinguished the blaze in a half-hour or so, it caused $50,000 in damage. For a century the Cleveland, Ohio river had been an open sewer for industrial waste, through the times when factory production seemed more important than worrying about the environment. Several fires had happened in the prior hundred years, but attitudes changed to outrage as this time, national attention was aroused. It became one of several disasters that led to the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Determined remedial action for decades since has resulted in cleaner water, and improving aquatic life.«

In 1946, jet airplanes were used to transport mail for the first time

June 22, 1870;;; United States Department of Justice created by the U.S. Congress. The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the U.S. government, responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice in the United States, equivalent to the justice or interior ministries of other countries. The department was formed in 1870 during the Ulysses S. Grant administration. In its early years, the DOJ vigorously prosecuted Ku Klux Klan members.