50 years ago: 1976

The 298th Light Equipment Maintenance Co., U.S. Army Reserve in Altoona, Capt. Donald E. Belsey commanding, left for McGuire Air Force Base, where they were to fly to Germany for two weeks of training.

25 years ago: 2001

Emily Kirsch, a sophomore at Bishop Guilfoyle High School, was named Blair County Dairy Princess in ceremonies at DelGrosso Family Amusement Park in Tipton. She delivered a speech titled “The Wonderful World of Dairy.”

10 years ago: 2016

The fifth annual Sci-Fi Valley Convention was underway at the Blair County Convention Center, Casey Basset founder. Special guest was actor John Rhys-Davies, who acted in the Indiana Jones and Lord of the Rings movies.

Today is Friday, June 12, the 163rd day of 2026. There are 202 days left in the year.

Today’s highlight in history:

On June 12, 2016, a gunman opened fire at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, leaving 49 people dead and 53 wounded in what was then the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history; the gunman, Omar Mateen, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group during a three-hour standoff before being killed in a shootout with police.

On this date:

– In 1942, Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday, less than a month before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis.

– In 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2001.)

– In 1964, eight South African anti-apartheid activists, including Nelson Mandela, were sentenced to life in prison for committing acts of sabotage against South Africa’s apartheid government.

– In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages, ruling that such laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

– In 1978, David Berkowitz was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for each of the six “Son of Sam” killings committed in New York City over the previous two years.

– In 1987, President Ronald Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

– In 1991, Russians went to the polls for their first-ever presidential election, which resulted in victory for Boris Yeltsin.

– In 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found dead outside Simpson’s Los Angeles home. (O.J.

Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson’s ex-husband, was later acquitted of the killings in a criminal trial but was eventually held liable in a civil action.)

– In 2025, an Air India plane bound for London crashed in a residential area of Ahmedabad shortly after takeoff, killing 241 people on board and 19 on the ground. One passenger who was thrown from the plane survived.

— The Associated Press