Today is Friday, July 31, the 212th day of 2009 with 153 to follow.

The moon is waxing. The morning stars are Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter, Venus and Mars. The evening stars are Mercury and Saturn.

This Day in History, July 31
On July 31st, 781, the oldest recorded eruption of Mt. Fuji took place.


Other Notable Events, July 31
In 1498, on his third voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus discovered the island of Trinidad.

In 1556 Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order of Roman Catholic missionaries and educators, died in Rome.

In 1792, director David Rittenhouse laid the cornerstone in Philadelphia for the U.S. Mint, the first building of the federal government.

In 1964, Ranger 7, an unmanned U.S. lunar probe, took the first close-up images of the moon.

In 1974, Watergate figure John Ehrlichman was sentenced to 20 months in prison for his role in the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Ellsberg was the Pentagon consultant who leaked the "Pentagon Papers," documents about the war in Vietnam.

In 1991, the U.S. Senate overturned a 43-year-old law and voted to allow women to fly military warplanes in combat.

In 1992, all aboard were killed when a Thai Airways jetliner carrying more than 100 people crashed in bad weather in Nepal.

In 1995, the Walt Disney Co. announced it was buying Capital Cities/ABC for $19 billion.

In 2002, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a reputed Russian crime figure, was arrested at his resort in Italy on charges he tried to fix two ice skating events at the Salt Lake City Olympic Games.

In 2003, North Korea reversed its long-standing opposition to multilateral talks on its nuclear weapons program.

In 2004, Pakistani investigators blamed al-Qaida for an assassination attempt on Prime Minister-designate Shaukat Aziz. Eight people died in the suicide bombing attack.

In 2006, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, two weeks before his 80th birthday, formally transferred power temporarily to his brother Raul in preparation for intestinal surgery.

In 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives passed, in a 411-8 vote, a bill overhauling ethics rules focused on large donations and gifts to lawmakers.

Also in 2007, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to deploy as many as 26,000 peacekeepers to end the violence in Sudan's Darfur region that reportedly killed about 200,000 people since 2003.

And, media mogul Rupert Murdoch won approval to buy the Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

In 2008, Exxon Mobil announced it had broken its own record for the greatest quarterly profit for a corporation with $11.68 billion.

Also in 2008, a federal judge ruled that U.S. President George Bush's advisers cannot ignore congressional subpoenas in an inquiry into the firing of several U.S. attorneys. Bush had said they were covered by executive privilege.

Notable Birthdays for July 31
Those born on this date include:
- Author and jurist James Kent in 1763
- Confederate Army guerrilla leader William Quantrill, in 1837
- Pollster Elmo Burns Roper Jr., in 1900
- Economist Milton Friedman in 1912
- Former TV talk-show host and columnist Irv Kupcinet in 1912
- Actor Don Murray in 1929 (age 80)
- Actress France Nuyen in 1939 (age 70)
- Geraldine Chaplin in 1944 (age 65)
- Singer Gary Lewis in 1945 (age 64)
- Australian tennis player Evonne Goolagong in 1951 (age 58)
- Actor Wesley Snipes in 1962 (age 47)
- Actor Dean Cain ( Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman ) in 1966 (age 43)


Copyright 2009 by United Press International