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Beware, for I am: 
Awake
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On This Day: Sunday August 20, 2006
This is the 232nd day of the year, with 133 days remaining in 2006.
Fact of the Day: bamboo
Bamboo is a grass with more than 1,000 species. These vary in size, some plants being as small as one foot tall while others can grow up to 130 feet tall. Some species can grow one foot per day! Bamboo can be useful or decorative. It can be used for food and medicine as well as building material and furniture. Thomas Edison experimented with more than 100 varieties of bamboo when trying to come up with a filament for the first electric light bulb.Holidays
- Feast day of St. Rognwald or Ronald, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Amator or Amadour, St. Philibert, and St. Oswin.
- Hungary: St. Stephen's Day.
- Morocco: Revolution of the King and the People.
Events
- 1667 - John Milton published "Paradise Lost," an epic poem about the fall of Adam and Eve.
- 1741 - Danish navigator Vitus Jonas Bering, commissioned by Peter the Great of Russia to find land connecting Asia and North America, discovered Alaska. His name still graces the Bering Sea and the Bering Strait.
- 1866 - President Andrew Johnson formally declared the Civil War over, even though the fighting had stopped months earlier.
- 1866 - The newly organized National Labor Union called on the U.S. Congress to mandate an eight-hour workday.
- 1940 - Radar was used for the first time, by the British during the Battle of Britain.
- 1960 - Senegal gained independence from France.
- 1968 - The Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations began invading Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague Spring" liberalization drive of Alexander Dubcek's regime.
- 1975 - Viking 1, an unmanned U.S. planetary probe, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to Mars.
- 1977 - The U.S. Voyager I spacecraft was launched on its journey via Jupiter and Saturn to become the first artificial object to leave the solar system.
- 1979 - Swimmer Diana Nyad succeeded in her third attempt at swimming from the Bahamas to Florida.
- 1991 - Estonia declared independence.
Births
- 1833 - Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd President of the United States of America (1889-1893).
Deaths
- 1940 - Leon Trotsky, Russian communist politician and rival of Joseph Stalin, assassinated.
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