Today is Wednesday, July 25, the 207th day of 2012. There are 159 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On July 25, 1972, the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment came to light as The Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service, in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been allowing poor, rural black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even allowing them to die, as a way of studying the disease.

On this date:

In 1866, Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army of the United States, the first officer to hold the rank.

In 1898, the United States invaded Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War.

In 1909, French aviator Louis Bleriot (bleh-ree-OH') became the first person to fly an airplane across the English Channel, traveling from Calais (kah-LAY') to Dover in 37 minutes.

In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States in retaliation for Japan's occupation of southern Indochina.

In 1946, the United States detonated an atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device.

In 1952, Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.

In 1956, the Italian liner Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger ship Stockholm off the New England coast late at night and began sinking; at least 51 people were killed.

In 1960, a Woolworth's store in Greensboro, N.C., that had been the scene of a sit-in protest against its whites-only lunch counter dropped its segregation policy.

In 1962, the Bell System inaugurated Skyphone, an air-to-ground radiotelephone service, as American Airlines stewardess Hope Patterson placed a call to Associated Press writer Francis Stilley in New York while flying over Lakehurst, N.J.

In 1984, Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya (sah-VEETS'-kah-yah) became the first woman to walk in space as she carried out more than three hours of experiments outside the orbiting space station Salyut 7.

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