Today's Highlight in History:
On Aug. 11, 1909, the first recorded use of the S.O.S. distress signal was by an American ship, the Arapahoe, off Cape Hatteras, N.C.
On this date:
In 1919, Germany's Weimar Constitution was signed by President Friedrich Ebert.
In 1934, the first federal prisoners arrived at the island prison Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.
In 1942, during World War II, Vichy government official Pierre Laval publicly declared that "the hour of liberation for France is the hour when Germany wins the war."
In 1954, a formal peace took hold in Indochina, ending more than seven years of fighting between the French and Communist Vietminh.
In 1956, abstract painter Jackson Pollock, 44, died in an automobile accident on Long Island, in Springs, N.Y.
In 1962, the Soviet Union launched cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev on a 94-hour flight.
In 1965, rioting and looting that claimed 34 lives broke out in the predominantly black Watts section of Los Angeles.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan joked during a voice test for a paid political radio address that he had "signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."
In 1991, Shiite Muslim kidnappers in Lebanon released two Western captives: Edward Tracy, an American held nearly five years, and Jerome Leyraud, a Frenchman who had been abducted by a rival group three days earlier.
In 1992, the Mall of America, the biggest shopping mall in the U.S., opened in Bloomington, Minn.
Ten years ago: President Bill Clinton made the first use of the historic line-item veto approved by Congress, rejecting three items in spending and tax bills. (However, the Supreme Court later struck down the line-item veto as unconstitutional.)
