Today in History.....June 29

On this day in …

* 1767, the British Parliament approved the Townshend Revenue Acts, which imposed import duties on certain goods shipped to America.
Colonists bitterly protested the Acts, which were repealed in 1770

* 1902, Marcel Renault won the four-day Paris-to-Vienna race, driving a car of his own design. The early city-to-city races were the largest sporting events of that era. Some three million people turned out to cheer Renault on to victory during the 15-hour, 615-mile race. These races were discontinued in large part due to Renault's fatal accident the following year at the Paris-Madrid race

* 1941, one week after launching a massive invasion of the USSR, German divisions make staggering advances on Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev

* 1966, during the Vietnam War, U.S. aircraft bomb the major North Vietnamese population centers of Hanoi and Haiphong for the first time, destroying oil depots located near the two cities. The U.S.
military hoped that by bombing Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, and Haiphong, North Vietnam's largest port, communist forces would be deprived of essential military supplies and thus the ability to wage war

* 1967, Jerusalem was reunified as Israel removed barricades separating the Old City from the Israeli sector

* 1970, U.S. ground combat troops end two months of operations in Cambodia and return to South Vietnam

* 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court rules by a vote of 5-4 that capital punishment, as it is currently employed on the state and federal level, is unconstitutional. The majority held that, in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, the death penalty qualified as "cruel and unusual punishment," primarily because states employed execution in "arbitrary and capricious ways," especially in regard to race. It was the first time that the nation's highest court had ruled against capital punishment.
However, because the Supreme Court suggested new legislation that could make death sentences constitutional again, such as the development of standardized guidelines for juries that decide sentences, it was not an outright victory for opponents of the death penalty

* 1974, with Argentine President Juan Peron on his deathbed, Isabela Martinez de Peron, his wife and vice president, is sworn in as the leader of the South American country. President Isabela Peron, a former dancer and Peron's third wife, was the Western Hemisphere's first female head of government. Two days later, Juan died from heart disease, and Isabela was left alone as leader of a nation suffering from serious economic and political strife

* 1989, in yet another reaction to the Chinese government's brutal massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing earlier in the month, the House of Representatives unanimously passes a package of sanctions against the People's Republic of China. American indignation, however, was relatively short-lived and most of the sanctions died out after a brief period

* 1995, the shuttle Atlantis and the space station Mir docked in orbit

* 2005, President Bush, embracing nearly all the recommendations of a White House commission, said he was creating a national security service at the FBI to specialize in intelligence as part of a shake-up of the disparate U.S. spy agencies