Today is Tuesday, August 8, the 220th day of 2006. There are 145 days left in the year.

ON THIS DATE<$>

In 1942, six convicted Nazi saboteurs who’d landed in the US were executed in Washington, D.C.; two others received life imprisonment.

In 1963, the Great Train Robbery — a gang held up the Glasgow-London mail train and made off with $2.6 million in banknotes.

In 1968, Richard M. Nixon was nominated for US president at the Republican national convention in Miami Beach, Florida.

In 1973, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew branded as “damned lies” reports he had taken kickbacks from government contracts in Maryland, and vowed not to resign — which he eventually did.

In 1974, President Nixon announced he would resign following damaging new revelations in the Watergate scandal.

In 1991, the slain bodies of former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar and his chief of staff were found in Bakhtiar’s residence outside Paris.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY

“It is the anonymous ‘they,’ the enigmatic ‘they’ who are in charge. Who is ‘they’? I don’t know. Nobody knows. Not even ‘they’ themselves.” — Joseph Heller, American author (1923-1999).