On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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Rajeev Samant's Sula Vineyards in Nasik, India, is success, doubling its output each year since 2000 and still not keeping up with demand; affluent young Indians have acquired taste for wine in country where wine drinking has not been part of modern mainstream Hindu culture; photo (M)
Mayor Michael R Bloomberg and New York City Council, after months of warnings of dire cuts to city services, agree on budget remarkable not for how many services are cut, but for how few; Bloomberg, to win council support, abandons $115 million in cuts he had planned, on top of $90 million in cuts he backed away from earlier; deal closes deficit that city estimated at $6.4 billion just seven months ago, doing so through combination of taxes, cuts, federal and state aid, and surplus from current year; many praise Bloomberg for closing daunting gap, but experts are divided on overall approach to balancing budget by sparing services while raising city's property tax, sales tax and income tax on top earners; some cuts that escape, or do not escape, budget axe noted; photo (M)
Ben Ratliff reviews concert by Norah Jones at Beacon Theater; photo (M)
Janet Maslin reviews book A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates by Blake Bailey; photo (M)
Moody's Investors Service lowers Sony Corp's long-term credit rating by one notch, citing weakened outlook for electronics division (M)
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of June 25, 2003, covering June 26, 2003.
Luther Vandross
Metallica
Radiohead
Annie Lennox
George Strait
2003Marc-Vivien Foé, Cameroon footballer (born 1975)[†]
Marc-Vivien Foé was a Cameroonian professional footballer, who played as a defensive midfielder.
2003Denis Thatcher, English soldier and businessman (born 1915)[†]
Sir Denis Thatcher, 1st Baronet, was an English businessman and the husband of Margaret Thatcher, who served as the first female British prime minister from 1979 to 1990; thus, he became the first male prime ministerial spouse.
2003Strom Thurmond, American general, lawyer, and politician, 103rd Governor of South Carolina (born 1902)[†]
James Strom Thurmond Sr. was an American politician who represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 to 2003. Before his 49 years as a senator, he served as the 103rd governor of South Carolina from 1947 to 1951. Thurmond was officially a member of the Democratic Party in the Senate until 1964, when he joined the Republican Party. He had earlier run for president in 1948 as the Dixiecrat candidate in opposition to Democratic president Harry Truman, receiving over a million votes and winning four states.
2003The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Lawrence v. Texas that sex-based sodomy laws are unconstitutional.[†]
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on questions of U.S. constitutional or federal law. It also has original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, specifically "all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party." In 1803, the Court asserted itself the power of judicial review, the ability to invalidate a statute for violating a provision of the Constitution via the landmark case Marbury v. Madison. It is also able to strike down presidential directives for violating either the Constitution or statutory law.
In 2003, the world population was approximately 6,420,361,634 people[†]