1995: Japan mourns Hiroshima anniversary
Up to 50,000 people have attended a memorial service in the Japanese city of Hiroshima on the 50th anniversary of the first atomic bombing.
The service took place in the Hiroshima Peace Park built directly below the point where the bomb exploded.

At precisely 0815 - a half-century to the minute after the bomb was dropped over the city - bells were rung and sirens wailed before a minute's silence was observed.

During the service attended by the Japanese Prime Minister and members of his cabinet, the city's mayor, Takashi Hiraoka, warned against the dangers of nuclear weapons.

"Nuclear weapons offer no security to the nations that possess them.

"As long as nuclear weapons exist, it is inevitable that some country, at some point, will experience the horror that Hiroshima and Nagasaki already know," Mr Hiraoka said.

In a conciliatory gesture Mr Hiraoka apologised for what he called the "unbearable suffering" that Japanese colonialism and brutality inflicted during the Second World War.

In an annual ritual the list of people killed by the bomb and its after-effects was updated.

This year the names of more than 5,000 people, mostly victims of radiation-caused leukaemia bring the total of Hiroshima's dead to more than 192,000.

For the first time Chinese and Korean survivors - many of who were being used as forced labour at the time of the blast - were invited to the official memorial service.

There were no representatives of the then Western Allied powers - who had ordered the bombing of Hiroshima, and three days later Nagasaki.

But a large contingent of Western mourners attended to show their solidarity against nuclear weapons.

August 7 1964:

The U.S. Congress passes Public Law 88-408, which becomes known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution,
giving President Johnson the power to take whatever actions he deems necessary to defend Southeast Asia including "the use of armed force."

The resolution passed 82-2 in the Senate, where Wayne K. Morse (D-Oregon) and Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska) were the only dissenting votes;
the bill passed 416-0 in the House of Representatives.
President Johnson signed it into law on August 10.
It became the legal basis for every presidential action taken by the Johnson administration during its conduct of the war.
Despite the initial support for the resolution,
it became increasingly controversial as Johnson used it to increase U.S. commitment to the war in Vietnam.
It would be repealed in May 1970.

August 7, 1947 : Wood raft makes 4,300-mile voyage

On this day in 1947, Kon-Tiki, a balsa wood raft captained by
Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, completes a 4,300-mile,
101-day journey from Peru to Raroia in the Tuamotu Archipelago, near
Tahiti. Heyerdahl wanted to prove his theory that prehistoric South
Americans could have colonized the Polynesian islands by drifting on
ocean currents.

Heyerdahl and his five-person crew set sail from Callao, Peru, on the
40-square-foot Kon-Tiki on April 28, 1947. The Kon-Tiki, named for a
mythical white chieftain, was made of indigenous materials and
designed to resemble rafts of early South American Indians. While
crossing the Pacific, the sailors encountered storms, sharks and
whales, before finally washing ashore at Raroia. Heyerdahl, born in
Larvik, Norway, on October 6, 1914, believed that Polynesia's earliest
inhabitants had come from South America, a theory that conflicted with
popular scholarly opinion that the original settlers arrived from
Asia. Even after his successful voyage, anthropologists and historians
continued to discredit Heyerdahl's belief. However, his journey
captivated the public and he wrote a book about the experience that
became an international bestseller and was translated into 65
languages. Heyerdahl also produced a documentary about the trip that
won an Academy Award in 1951.

Heyerdahl made his first expedition to Polynesia in 1937. He and his
first wife lived primitively on Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas Islands for
a year and studied plant and animal life. The experience led him to
believe that humans had first come to the islands aboard primitive
vessels drifting on ocean currents from the east.

Following the Kon-Tiki expedition, Heyerdahl made archeological trips
to such places as the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island and Peru and
continued to test his theories about how travel across the seas played
a major role in the migration patterns of ancient cultures. In 1970,
he sailed across the Atlantic from Morocco to Barbados in a reed boat
named Ra II (after Ra, the Egyptian sun god) to prove that Egyptians
could have connected with pre-Columbian Americans. In 1977, he sailed
the Indian Ocean in a primitive reed ship built in Iraq to learn how
prehistoric civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and Egypt
might have connected.

While Heyerdahl's work was never embraced by most scholars, he
remained a popular public figure and was voted "Norwegian of the
Century" in his homeland. He died at age 87 on April 18, 2002, in
Italy. The raft from his famous 1947 expedition is housed at the
Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway.

August 8, 1974 : Nixon resigns

In an evening televised address, President Richard M. Nixon announces
his intention to become the first president in American history to
resign. With impeachment proceedings underway against him for his
involvement in the Watergate affair, Nixon was finally bowing to
pressure from the public and Congress to leave the White House. "By
taking this action," he said in a solemn address from the Oval Office,
"I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing
which is so desperately needed in America."

Just before noon the next day, Nixon officially ended his term as the
37th president of the United States. Before departing with his family
in a helicopter from the White House lawn, he smiled farewell and
enigmatically raised his arms in a victory or peace salute. The
helicopter door was then closed, and the Nixon family began their
journey home to San Clemente, California. Minutes later, Vice
President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as the 38th president of the
United States in the East Room of the White House. After taking the
oath of office, President Ford spoke to the nation in a television
address, declaring, "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare
is over." He later pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed
while in office, explaining that he wanted to end the national
divisions created by the Watergate scandal.

On June 17, 1972, five men, including a salaried security coordinator
for President Nixon's reelection committee, were arrested for breaking
into and illegally wiretapping the Democratic National Committee
headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate complex. Soon after,
two other former White House aides were implicated in the break-in,
but the Nixon administration denied any involvement. Later that year,
reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post
discovered a higher-echelon conspiracy surrounding the incident, and a
political scandal of unprecedented magnitude erupted.

In May 1973, the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign
Activities, headed by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, began
televised proceedings on the rapidly escalating Watergate affair. One
week later, Harvard law professor Archibald Cox was sworn in as
special Watergate prosecutor. During the Senate hearings, former White
House legal counsel John Dean testified that the Watergate break-in
had been approved by former Attorney General John Mitchell with the
knowledge of White House advisers John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman,
and that President Nixon had been aware of the cover-up. Meanwhile,
Watergate prosecutor Cox and his staff began to uncover widespread
evidence of political espionage by the Nixon reelection committee,
illegal wiretapping of thousands of citizens by the administration,
and contributions to the Republican Party in return for political
favors.

In July, the existence of what were to be called the Watergate
tapes--official recordings of White House conversations between Nixon
and his staff--was revealed during the Senate hearings. Cox subpoenaed
these tapes, and after three months of delay President Nixon agreed to
send summaries of the recordings. Cox rejected the summaries, and
Nixon fired him. His successor as special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski,
leveled indictments against several high-ranking administration
officials, including Mitchell and Dean, who were duly convicted.

Public confidence in the president rapidly waned, and by the end of
July 1974 the House Judiciary Committee had adopted three articles of
impeachment against President Nixon: obstruction of justice, abuse of
presidential powers, and hindrance of the impeachment process. On July
30, under coercion from the Supreme Court, Nixon finally released the
Watergate tapes. On August 5, transcripts of the recordings were
released, including a segment in which the president was heard
instructing Haldeman to order the FBI to halt the Watergate
investigation. Three days later, Nixon announced his resignation.

August 9 1969:

Five people are killed in film director Roman Polanski's home in Hollywood, California,
including Polanski's pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by a members of a cult.
Less than two days later, they struck again, killing Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in their home.
At both scenes, the killers scrawled messages in blood on the walls.
The city of Los Angeles was in a state of panic until the leader of the cult, Charles Manson, was identified and arrested.
Joan Didion, author of The White Album, wrote that many in Los Angeles believed "the 60s abruptly ended on August 9, 1969."