On this day: August 7
POSTED: 02:38 PM PDT Aug 06, 2012
UPDATED: 11:00 PM PDT Aug 06, 2012
The Purple Heart is born, a comic legend dies, a man on a wire goes for a stroll a quarter of a mile above the sidewalks of Manhattan, and U.S. embassies in Africa are targeted in a terrorist attack, all on this day.
Gerado Magallon/Reuters
1998: The United States embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, kill approximately 212 people. The attacks were linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, brought Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to the attention of the American public for the first time, and resulted in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation placing bin Laden on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
