Today is Tuesday, June 18, the 169th day of 2019. There are 196 days left in the year.

On June 18, 1979, President Jimmy Carter and Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev signed the SALT II strategic arms limitation treaty in Vienna.



In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte met defeat at Waterloo as British and Prussian troops defeated the French in Belgium.

In 1940, during World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill urged his countrymen to conduct themselves in a manner that would prompt future generations to say, "This was their finest hour." Charles de Gaulle delivered a speech on the BBC in which he rallied his countrymen after the fall of France to Nazi Germany.

In 1945, William Joyce, known as "Lord Haw-Haw," was charged in London with high treason for his English-language wartime broadcasts on German radio. (He was hanged in January 1946.)

In 1948, Columbia Records publicly unveiled its new long-playing phonograph record in New York.



In 1983, astronaut Sally K. Ride became America's first woman in space as she and four colleagues blasted off aboard the space shuttle Challenger on a six-day mission.


In 1996, Richard Allen Davis was convicted in San Jose, California, of the 1993 kidnap-murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas of Petaluma. (Davis remains on death row.)
