Today in History

[Duke of Buckingham]

Apr 5, 1614:
Pocahontas marries John Rolfe

Pocahontas, daughter of the chief of the Powhatan Indian confederacy, marries English tobacco planter John Rolfe in Jamestown, Virginia. The marriage ensured peace between the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan Indians for several years.

In May 1607, about 100 English colonists settled along the James River in Virginia to found Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America. The settlers fared badly because of famine, disease, and Indian attacks, but were aided by 27-year-old English adventurer John Smith, who directed survival efforts and mapped the area. While exploring the Chickahominy River in December 1607, Smith and two colonists were captured by Powhatan warriors. At the time, the Powhatan confederacy consisted of around 30 Tidewater-area tribes led by Chief Wahunsonacock, known as Chief Powhatan to the English. Smith's companions were killed, but he was spared and released, (according to a 1624 account by Smith) because of the dramatic intercession of Pocahontas, Chief Powhatan's 13-year-old daughter. Her real name was Matoaka, and Pocahontas was a pet name that has been translated variously as "playful one" and "my favorite daughter."

In 1608, Smith became president of the Jamestown colony, but the settlement continued to suffer. An accidental fire destroyed much of the town, and hunger, disease, and Indian attacks continued. During this time, Pocahontas often came to Jamestown as an emissary of her father, sometimes bearing gifts of food to help the hard-pressed settlers. She befriended the settlers and became acquainted with English ways. In 1609, Smith was injured from a fire in his gunpowder bag and was forced to return to England.

After Smith's departure, relations with the Powhatan deteriorated and many settlers died from famine and disease in the winter of 1609-10. Jamestown was about to be abandoned by its inhabitants when Baron De La Warr (also known as Delaware) arrived in June 1610 with new supplies and rebuilt the settlement--the Delaware River and the colony of Delaware were later named after him. John Rolfe also arrived in Jamestown in 1610 and two years later cultivated the first tobacco there, introducing a successful source of livelihood that would have far-reaching importance for Virginia.

In the spring of 1613, English Captain Samuel Argall took Pocahontas hostage, hoping to use her to negotiate a permanent peace with her father. Brought to Jamestown, she was put under the custody of Sir Thomas Gates, the marshal of Virginia. Gates treated her as a guest rather than a prisoner and encouraged her to learn English customs. She converted to Christianity and was baptized Lady Rebecca. Powhatan eventually agreed to the terms for her release, but by then she had fallen in love with John Rolfe, who was about 10 years her senior. On April 5, 1614, Pocahontas and John Rolfe married with the blessing of Chief Powhatan and the governor of Virginia.

Their marriage brought a peace between the English colonists and the Powhatans, and in 1615 Pocahontas gave birth to their first child, Thomas. In 1616, the couple sailed to England. The so-called Indian Princess proved popular with the English gentry, and she was presented at the court of King James I. In March 1617, Pocahontas and Rolfe prepared to sail back to Virginia. However, the day before they were to leave, Pocahontas died, probably of smallpox, and was buried at the parish church of St. George in Gravesend, England.

John Rolfe returned to Virginia and was killed in an Indian massacre in 1622. After an education in England, their son Thomas Rolfe returned to Virginia and became a prominent citizen. John Smith returned to the New World in 1614 to explore the New England coast. On another voyage of exploration in 1614, he was captured by pirates but escaped after three months of captivity. He then returned to England, where he died in 1631.




Apr 5, 1859:
Darwin sends first three chapters of The Origin of Species to his publisher

Naturalist Charles Darwin sends his publishers the first three chapters of Origin of Species, which will become one of the most influential books ever published.

Knowing the fates of scientists who had published radical theories and been ostracized or worse, Darwin held off publishing his theory of natural selection for years. He secretly developed his theory during two decades of surreptitious research following his return from a five-year voyage to South America on the HMS Beagle as the ship's unpaid botanist.

Darwin, the privileged and well-connected son of a successful English doctor, had been interested in botany and natural sciences since his boyhood, despite the discouragement of his early teachers. At Cambridge, he found professors and scientists with similar interests and with their help began participating in scientific voyages, including the HMS Beagle's trip. By the time Darwin returned, he had developed an outstanding reputation as a field researcher and scientific writer, based on his many papers and letters dispatched from South America and the Galapagos Islands, which were read at meetings of prominent scientific societies in London.

Darwin began publishing studies of zoology and geology as soon as he returned from his voyage, while secretly working on his radical theory of evolution. Meanwhile, he married and had seven children. He finally published The Origin of Species after another scientist began publishing papers with similar ideas. When the book appeared in November 1859, it sold out immediately. By 1872, six editions had been published. It laid the groundwork for modern botany, cellular biology, and genetics. Darwin died in 1882.





Also on This Day

Lead Story
Pocahontas marries John Rolfe, 1614

American Revolution
Benjamin Franklin publishes "An Open Letter to Lord North", 1774

Automotive
NASCAR legend Lee Petty dies, 2000

Civil War
Siege of Yorktown begins, 1862

Cold War
Rosenbergs sentenced to death for spying, 1951

Crime
Kurt Cobain commits suicide, 1994

Disaster
Tornadoes devastate Tupelo and Gainesville, 1936

General Interest
Rosenbergs sentenced to die, 1951
Winston Churchill resigns, 1955
Abortion rights advocates march on Washington, 1992

Hollywood
Charlton Heston dies, 2008

Literary
Darwin sends first three chapters of The Origin of Species to his publisher, 1859

Music
James Brown calms Boston following the King assassination, 1968

Old West
Howard Hughes dies, 1976

Presidential
Washington exercises first presidential veto, 1792

Sports
Abdul-Jabbar breaks points record, 1984

Vietnam War
Antiwar demonstrations held across United States, 1969
North Vietnamese launch second front of Nguyen Hue Offensive, 1972

World War I
First stage of German spring offensive ends, 1918

World War II
Tito signs "friendship treaty" with Soviet Union, 1945


More on: This Day in History from History Channel

[Duke of Buckingham]

Apr 6, 1896:
First modern Olympic Games

On April 6, 1896, the Olympic Games, a long-lost tradition of ancient Greece, are reborn in Athens 1,500 years after being banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I. At the opening of the Athens Games, King Georgios I of Greece and a crowd of 60,000 spectators welcomed athletes from 13 nations to the international competition.

The first recorded Olympic Games were held at Olympia in the Greek city-state of Elis in 776 B.C., but it is generally accepted that the Olympics were at least 500 years old at that time. The ancient Olympics, held every four years, occurred during a religious festival honoring the Greek god Zeus. In the eighth century B.C., contestants came from a dozen or more Greek cities, and by the fifth century B.C. from as many as 100 cities from throughout the Greek empire. Initially, Olympic competition was limited to foot races, but later a number of other events were added, including wrestling, boxing, horse and chariot racing, and military competitions. The pentathlon, introduced in 708 B.C., consisted of a foot race, the long jump, discus and javelin throws, and wrestling. With the rise of Rome, the Olympics declined, and in 393 A.D. the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, a Christian, abolished the Games as part of his efforts to suppress paganism in the Roman Empire.

With the Renaissance, Europe began a long fascination with ancient Greek culture, and in the 18th and 19th centuries some nations staged informal sporting and folkloric festivals bearing the name "Olympic Games." However, it was not until 1892 that a young French baron, Pierre de Coubertin, seriously proposed reviving the Olympics as a major international competition that would occur every four years. At a conference on international sport in Paris in June 1894, Coubertin again raised the idea, and the 79 delegates from nine countries unanimously approved his proposal. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was formed, and the first Games were planned for 1896 in Athens, the capital of Greece.

In Athens, 280 participants from 13 nations competed in 43 events, covering track-and-field, swimming, gymnastics, cycling, wrestling, weightlifting, fencing, shooting, and tennis. All the competitors were men, and a few of the entrants were tourists who stumbled upon the Games and were allowed to sign up. The track-and-field events were held at the Panathenaic Stadium, which was originally built in 330 B.C. and restored for the 1896 Games. Americans won nine out of 12 of these events. The 1896 Olympics also featured the first marathon competition, which followed the 25-mile route run by a Greek soldier who brought news of a victory over the Persians from Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C. In 1924, the marathon was standardized at 26 miles and 385 yards. Appropriately, a Greek, Spyridon Louis, won the first marathon at the 1896 Athens Games.

Pierre de Coubertin became IOC president in 1896 and guided the Olympic Games through its difficult early years, when it lacked much popular support and was overshadowed by world's fairs. In 1924, the first truly successful Olympic Games were held in Paris, involving more than 3,000 athletes, including more than 100 women, from 44 nations. The first Winter Olympic Games were also held that year. In 1925, Coubertin retired. The Olympic Games have come to be regarded as the foremost international sports competition. At the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, more than 10,000 athletes from 200 countries competed, including nearly 4,000 women. In 2004, the Summer Olympics returned to Athens, with more than 11,000 athletes competing from 202 countries. In a proud moment for Greeks and an exciting one for spectators, the shotput competition was held at the site of the classical Games in Olympia.




Apr 6, 1968:
2001: A Space Odyssey released

On this day in 1968, Stanley’s Kubrick’s science-fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey makes its debut in movie theaters.

Kubrick had first gained prominence as a director for the World War I-era drama Paths of Glory (1957). After helming the big-budget Roman epic Spartacus (1960), he made a 1962 screen adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita before turning to an even more controversial topic--nuclear warfare--in the darkly bizarre satire Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). In the spring of 1964, Kubrick met with Arthur C. Clarke, a former officer in the Royal Air Force and chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, who had begun a full-time science-fiction writing career in 1951. Over the next year, Clarke and Kubrick worked closely to adapt the former’s short story “The Sentinel” into a movie screenplay as well as a full-length novel. Clarke also worked as a general scientific adviser on the film.

Originally entitled A Journey Beyond the Stars, Kubrick’s film was released in April 1968 as 2001: A Space Odyssey. Jumping seamlessly from Africa in the Pleistocene Era to a space-shuttle cabin some 4 million years later, the film clocked in at around three hours and contained less than 40 minutes of dialogue. Stretches of absolute silence or of the sound of human breathing (mimicking the external and internal experience of being inside a space suit) were interspersed with grand orchestral scores, including work by both Richard and Johann Strauss. Kubrick intended 2001 to be a primarily visual--rather than verbal--experience, and the scarcity of dialogue and languid pacing only enhanced the impact of the film’s impressive visual effects.

Though 2001 received many negative reviews when it was released--The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, for one, called it “monumentally unimaginative”--its prestige grew over the years and it is now regarded by many as Kubrick’s masterwork and one of the most significant films of the 20th century. Its sweeping visual style and psychedelic special effects directly influenced space blockbusters such as George Lucas’ Star Wars movies. At the 41st annual Academy Awards in April 1969, the film did not receive a nomination for Best Picture, though Kubrick was nominated in the Best Director category; he lost to Sir Carol Reed for Oliver! Of four nominations, 2001 won one Oscar, for Best Visual Effects.





Also on This Day

Lead Story
First modern Olympic Games, 1896

American Revolution
Congress opens all U.S. ports to international trade, 1776

Automotive
Emil Jellinek-Mercedes born, 1853

Civil War
Battle of Shiloh begins, 1862

Cold War
U.S. and Soviet negotiators make progress, 1990

Crime
Sam Sheppard dies, 1970

Disaster
Train falls off bridge in Brazil, 1950

General Interest
Mormon Church established, 1830
Peary's expedition reaches North Pole?, 1909
America enters World War I, 1917

Hollywood
2001: A Space Odyssey released, 1968

Literary
Oscar Wilde arrested, 1895

Music
The Eurovision song contest launches a bona fide star, 1974

Old West
Black Hawk War begins, 1832

Presidential
Tyler is inaugurated as 10th president, 1841

Sports
First modern Olympics is held, 1896

Vietnam War
U.S. ground combat troops to take offensive measures, 1965
U.S. forces respond to North Vietnamese offensive, 1972

World War I
U.S. enters World War I, 1917

World War II
Germany invades Yugoslavia and Greece, 1941

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 7th

451 – Attila the Hun sacks the town of Metz and attacks other cities in Gaul.
529 – First draft of the Corpus Juris Civilis (a fundamental work in jurisprudence) is issued by Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I.
1348 – Charles University is founded in Prague.
1521 – Ferdinand Magellan arrives at Cebu.
1541 – Francis Xavier leaves Lisbon on a mission to the Portuguese East Indies.
1724 – Premiere performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion BWV 245 at St. Nicholas Church, Leipzig.
1767 – End of Burmese–Siamese War (1765–1767)
1776 – Captain John Barry and the USS Lexington captures the Edward.
1788 – American Pioneers to the Northwest Territory arrive at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers, establishing Marietta, Ohio, as the first permanent American settlement of the new United States in the Northwest Territory, and opening the westward expansion of the new country.
1798 – The Mississippi Territory is organized from disputed territory claimed by both the United States and Spain. It is expanded in 1804 and again in 1812.
1805 – Lewis and Clark Expedition: The Corps of Discovery breaks camp among the Mandan tribe and resumes its journey West along the Missouri River.
1827 – John Walker, an English chemist, sells the first friction match that he had invented the previous year.
1829 – Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, commences translation of the Book of Mormon, with Oliver Cowdery as his scribe.
1831 – D. Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil, resigns. He goes to his native Portugal to become King D. Pedro IV.
1862 – American Civil War: Battle of Shiloh ends – the Union Army under General Ulysses S. Grant defeats the Confederates near Shiloh, Tennessee.
1868 – Thomas D'Arcy McGee, one of the Canadian Fathers of Confederation is assassinated by the Irish, in one of the few Canadian political assassinations, and the only one of a federal politician.
1890 – Completion of the first Lake Biwa Canal.
1906 – Mount Vesuvius erupts and devastates Naples.
1906 – The Algeciras Conference gives France and Spain control over Morocco.
1908 – H. H. Asquith of the Liberal Party takes office as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, succeeding Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
1922 – Teapot Dome scandal: United States Secretary of the Interior leases Teapot Dome petroleum reserves in Wyoming.
1927 – First distance public television broadcast (from Washington, D.C., to New York City, displaying the image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover).
1933 – Prohibition in the United States is repealed for beer of no more than 3.2% alcohol by weight, eight months before the ratification of the XXI amendment.
1939 – World War II: Italy invades Albania.
1940 – Booker T. Washington becomes the first African American to be depicted on a United States postage stamp.
1943 – Holocaust: In Terebovlia, Ukraine, Germans order 1,100 Jews to undress to their underwear and march through the city of Terebovlia to the nearby village of Plebanivka where they are shot dead and buried in ditches.
1943 – Ioannis Rallis becomes collaborationist Prime Minister of Greece during the Axis Occupation.
1945 – World War II: The Japanese battleship Yamato, the largest battleship ever constructed, is sunk by American planes 200 miles north of Okinawa while en route to a suicide mission in Operation Ten-Go.
1945 – World War II: Visoko is liberated by the 7th, 9th, and 17th Krajina brigades from the Tenth division of Yugoslav Partisan forces.
1946 – Syria's independence from France is officially recognized.
1948 – The World Health Organization is established by the United Nations.
1948 – A Buddhist monastery burns in Shanghai, China, leaving twenty monks dead.
1954 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower gives his "domino theory" speech during a news conference.
1955 – Winston Churchill resigns as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom amid indications of failing health.
1956 – Spain relinquishes its protectorate in Morocco.
1964 – IBM announces the System/360.
1967 – Film critic Roger Ebert published his very first film review in the Chicago Sun-Times.
1969 – The Internet's symbolic birth date: publication of RFC 1.
1971 – President Richard Nixon announces his decision to increase the rate of American troop withdrawals from Vietnam.
1976 – Former British Cabinet Minister John Stonehouse resigns from the Labour Party.
1977 – German Federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback and his driver are shot by two Red Army Faction members while waiting at a red light.
1978 – Development of the neutron bomb is canceled by President Jimmy Carter.
1983 – During STS-6, astronauts Story Musgrave and Don Peterson perform the first space shuttle spacewalk.
1985 – Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declares a moratorium on the deployment of middle-range missiles in Europe.
1989 – Soviet submarine Komsomolets sinks in the Barents Sea off the coast of Norway killing 42 sailors.
1990 – Iran Contra Affair: John Poindexter is found guilty of five charges for his part in the scandal (the conviction is later reversed on appeal).
1990 – A fire breaks out on the passenger ferry M/S Scandinavian Star, killing 158 people.
1992 – Republika Srpska announces its independence.
1994 – Rwandan Genocide: Massacres of Tutsis begin in Kigali, Rwanda.
1994 – Auburn Calloway attempts to hijack FedEx Express Flight 705 and crash it to insure his family with his life insurance policy. The crew subdues him and lands the aircraft safely.
1995 – First Chechen War: Russian paramilitary troops begin a massacre of civilians in Samashki, Chechnya.
1999 – The World Trade Organization rules in favor of the United States in its long-running trade dispute with the European Union over bananas.
2001 – Mars Odyssey is launched.
2003 – U.S. troops capture Baghdad; Saddam Hussein's regime falls two days later.
2009 – Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori is sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering killings and kidnappings by security forces.
2009 – Mass protests begin across Moldova under the belief that results from the parliamentary election are fraudulent.


Request for Comments

The inception of the RFC format occurred in 1969 as part of the seminal ARPANET project. Today, it is the official publication channel for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), and — to some extent — the global community of computer network researchers in general.

The authors of the first RFCs typewrote their work and circulated hard copies among the ARPA researchers. Unlike the modern RFCs, many of the early RFCs were actual requests for comments, and were titled as such to avoid sounding too declarative and encourage discussion. The RFC leaves questions open and is written in a less formal style. This less formal style is now typical of Internet Draft documents, the precursor step before being approved as an RFC.

In December 1969, researchers began distributing new RFCs via the newly operational ARPANET. RFC 1, entitled "Host Software", was written by Steve Crocker of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and published on April 7, 1969. Although written by Steve Crocker, the RFC emerged from an early working group discussion between Steve Crocker, Steve Carr and Jeff Rulifson.


2001 Mars Odyssey

2001 Mars Odyssey is a robotic spacecraft orbiting the planet Mars. The project was developed by NASA, and contracted out to Lockheed Martin, with an expected cost for the entire mission of US$297 million. Its mission is to use spectrometers and electronic imagers to detect evidence of past or present water and volcanic activity on Mars. It is hoped that the data Odyssey obtains will help answer the question of whether life has ever existed on Mars. It also acts as a relay for communications between the Mars Exploration Rovers, Mars Science Laboratory, and the Phoenix lander to Earth. The mission was named as a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke, evoking the name of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Odyssey was launched April 7, 2001 on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and reached Mars orbit on October 24, 2001, at 2:30 a.m. UTC (October 23, 7:30 p.m. PDT, 10:30 p.m. EDT). The spacecraft's main engine fired in order to brake the spacecraft's speed, which allowed it to be captured into orbit around Mars. Odyssey used a technique called "aerobraking" that gradually brought the spacecraft closer to Mars with each orbit. By using the atmosphere of Mars to slow down the spacecraft in its orbit, rather than firing its engine or thrusters, Odyssey was able to save more than 200 kilograms (440 lb) of propellant. Aerobraking ended in January, and Odyssey began its science mapping mission on February 19, 2002.

By December 15, 2010 it broke the record for longest serving spacecraft at Mars, with 3,340 days of operation, claiming the title from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor. It currently holds the record for the longest-surviving continually active spacecraft in orbit around a planet other than Earth at 11 years, 5 months, and 13 days.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 8

217 – Roman Emperor Caracalla is assassinated (and succeeded) by his Praetorian Guard prefect, Marcus Opellius Macrinus.
876 – The Battle of Dayr al-'Aqul saves Baghdad from the Saffarids.
1093 – The new Winchester Cathedral is dedicated by Walkelin.
1139 – Roger II of Sicily is excommunicated.
1149 – Pope Eugene III takes refuge in the castle of Ptolemy II of Tusculum.
1271 – In Syria, sultan Baybars conquers the Krak of Chevaliers.
1730 – Shearith Israel, the first synagogue in New York City, is dedicated.
1740 – War of Jenkin's Ear: Three British ships capture the Spanish third-rate Princesa.
1808 – The Roman Catholic Diocese of Baltimore is promoted to an archdiocese, with the founding of the dioceses of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Bardstown (now Louisville) by Pope Pius VII.
1820 – The Venus de Milo is discovered on the Aegean island of Melos.
1832 – Black Hawk War: Around three-hundred United States 6th Infantry troops leave St. Louis, Missouri to fight the Sauk Native Americans.
1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Mansfield – Union forces are thwarted by the Confederate army at Mansfield, Louisiana.
1866 – Italy and Prussia ally against the Austrian Empire.
1886 – William Ewart Gladstone introduces the first Irish Home Rule Bill into the British House of Commons.
1893 – The first recorded college basketball game occurs at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.
1895 – In Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. the Supreme Court of the United States declares unapportioned income tax to be unconstitutional.
1904 – The French Third Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland sign the Entente cordiale.
1904 – British mystic Aleister Crowley transcribes the first chapter of The Book of the Law.
1904 – Longacre Square in Midtown Manhattan is renamed Times Square after The New York Times.
1906 – Auguste Deter, the first person to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, dies.
1908 – Harvard University votes to establish the Harvard Business School.
1911 – Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovers superconductivity.
1913 – The 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution, requiring direct election of Senators, becomes law.
1916 – In Corona, California, race car driver Bob Burman crashes, killing three, and badly injuring five, spectators.
1918 – World War I: Actors Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin sell war bonds on the streets of New York City's financial district.
1929 – Indian Independence Movement: At the Delhi Central Assembly, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt throw handouts and bombs to court arrest.
1935 – The Works Progress Administration is formed when the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 becomes law.
1942 – World War II: Siege of Leningrad – Soviet forces open a much-needed railway link to Leningrad.
1942 – World War II: The Japanese take Bataan in the Philippines.
1943 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in an attempt to check inflation, freezes wages and prices, prohibits workers from changing jobs unless the war effort would be aided thereby, and bars rate increases by common carriers and public utilities.
1945 – World War II: After an air raid accidentally destroys a train carrying about 4,000 Nazi concentration camp internees in Prussian Hanover, the survivors are massacred by Nazis.
1946 – Électricité de France, the world's largest utility company, is formed as a result of the nationalisation of a number of electricity producers, transporters and distributors.
1950 – India and Pakistan sign the Liaquat-Nehru Pact.
1952 – U.S. President Harry Truman calls for the seizure of all domestic steel mills to prevent a nationwide strike.
1953 – Mau Mau leader Jomo Kenyatta is convicted by Kenya's British rulers.
1954 – A Royal Canadian Air Force Canadair Harvard collided with a Trans-Canada Airlines Canadair North Star over Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, killing 37 people.
1954 – South African Airways Flight 201 A de Havilland DH.106 Comet 1 crashes into the sea during night killing 21 people.
1959 – A team of computer manufacturers, users, and university people led by Grace Hopper meets to discuss the creation of a new programming language that would be called COBOL.
1959 – The Organization of American States drafts an agreement to create the Inter-American Development Bank.
1960 – The Netherlands and West Germany sign an agreement to negotiate the return of German land annexed by the Dutch in return for 280 million German marks as Wiedergutmachung.
1961 – A large explosion on board the MV Dara in the Persian Gulf kills 238.
1968 – BOAC Flight 712 catches fire shortly after take off. As a result of her actions in the accident, Barbara Jane Harrison is awarded a posthumous George Cross, the only GC awarded to a woman in peacetime.
1970 – Bahr el-Baqar incident: Israeli bombers strike an Egyptian school. 46 children are killed.
1974 – At Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, Hank Aaron hits his 715th career home run to surpass Babe Ruth's 39-year-old record.
1975 – Frank Robinson manages the Cleveland Indians in his first game as major league baseball's first African American manager.
1987 – Los Angeles Dodgers executive Al Campanis resigns amid controversy over racially charged remarks he had made while on Nightline.
1989 – Ashland, Kentucky beautiful Kaitlyn Braden is born as the cutest person ever. What the balls is this bullcrap?
1992 – Retired tennis great Arthur Ashe announces that he has AIDS, acquired from blood transfusions during one of his two heart surgeries.
1993 – The Republic of Macedonia joins the United Nations.
1999 – Haryana Gana Parishad, a political party in the Indian state of Haryana, merges with the Indian National Congress.
2004 – Darfur conflict: The Humanitarian Ceasefire Agreement is signed by the Sudanese government and two rebel groups.
2005 – Over four million people attend the funeral of Pope John Paul II.
2006 – Shedden massacre: The bodies of eight men, all shot to death, are found in a field in Ontario, Canada. The murders are soon linked to the Bandidos motorcycle gang.
2008 – The construction of the world's first building to integrate wind turbines is completed in Bahrain.


COBOL
COBOL (pron.: /ˈkoʊbɒl/) is one of the oldest programming languages, primarily designed by Grace Hopper. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments.

The COBOL 2002 standard includes support for object-oriented programming and other modern language features.

The COBOL specification was created by a committee of researchers from private industry, universities, and government during the second half of 1959. The specifications were to a great extent inspired by the FLOW-MATIC language invented by Grace Hopper, commonly referred to as "the mother of the COBOL language." The IBM COMTRAN language invented by Bob Bemer was also drawn upon, but the FACT language specification from Honeywell was not distributed to committee members until late in the process and had relatively little impact. FLOW-MATIC's status as the only language of the bunch to have actually been implemented made it particularly attractive to the committee.


Bahr El-Baqar primary school bombing

The Bahr el-Baqar primary school bombing occurred on 8 April 1970, during the War of Attrition. The Israeli Air Force carried out an air raid on the Egyptian village of Bahr el-Baqar, in the eastern province of Sharqiyya. The raid resulted in the destruction of a primary school that was in use during the attack, killing 46 children. Israel was under the impression that the school was an Egyptian military installation.

Israel claims that it had thought the school was an Egyptian military installation. The attack was carried out by Israeli Air Force F4 Phantom II fighter bombers, at 9:20 am on Wednesday April 8. Five bombs and 2 air-to-ground missiles struck the single-floor school, which consisted of 3 classrooms.

Of the 130 school children who attended the school, 46 were killed and over 50 wounded. The school itself was completely demolished.


Bahrain World Trade Center

The two towers are linked via three skybridges, each holding a 225kW wind turbine, totalling to 675kW of wind power production. Each of these turbines measure 29 m (95 ft) in diameter, and is aligned north, which is the direction from which air from the Persian Gulf blows in. The sail-shaped buildings on either side are designed to funnel wind through the gap to provide accelerated wind passing through the turbines. This was confirmed by wind tunnel tests, which showed that the buildings create an S-shaped flow, ensuring that any wind coming within a 45° angle to either side of the central axis will create a wind stream that remains perpendicular to the turbines. This significantly increases their potential to generate electricity.

The wind turbines are expected to provide 11% to 15% of the towers' total power consumption, or approximately 1.1 to 1.3 GWh a year. This is equivalent to providing the lighting for about 300 homes. The three turbines were turned on for the first time on 8 April 2008. They are expected to operate 50% of the time on an average day.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 9

193 – Septimius Severus is proclaimed Roman Emperor by the army in Illyricum (in the Balkans).
475 – Byzantine Emperor Basiliscus issues a circular letter (Enkyklikon) to the bishops of his empire, supporting the Monophysite christological position.
537 – Siege of Rome: The Byzantine general Belisarius receives his promised reinforcements, 1,600 cavalry, mostly of Hunnic or Slavic origin and expert bowmen. He starts, despite of shortages, raids against the Gothic camps and Vitiges is forced into a stalemate.
1241 – Battle of Liegnitz: Mongol forces defeat the Polish and German armies.
1388 – Despite being outnumbered 16 to 1, forces of the Old Swiss Confederacy are victorious over the Archduchy of Austria in the Battle of Näfels.
1413 – Henry V is crowned King of England.
1440 – Christopher of Bavaria is appointed King of Denmark.
1454 – The Treaty of Lodi is signed, establishing a balance of power among northern Italian city-states for almost 50 years.
1511 – St John's College, Cambridge, England, founded by Lady Margaret Beaufort, receives its charter.
1585 – The expedition organised by Sir Walter Raleigh departs England for Roanoke Island (now in North Carolina) to establish the Roanoke Colony.
1609 – Eighty Years' War: Spain and the Dutch Republic sign the Treaty of Antwerp to initiate twelve years of truce.
1682 – Robert Cavelier de La Salle discovers the mouth of the Mississippi River, claims it for France and names it Louisiana.
1782 – American War of Independence: Battle of the Saintes begins.
1860 – On his phonautograph machine, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville makes the oldest known recording of an audible human voice.
1852 – At a general conference of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Brigham Young explains the Adam–God doctrine, an important part of the theology of Mormon fundamentalism.
1865 – American Civil War: Robert E. Lee surrenders the Army of Northern Virginia (26,765 troops) to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, effectively ending the war.
1867 – Alaska purchase: Passing by a single vote, the United States Senate ratifies a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska.
1909 – The U.S. Congress passes the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act.
1914 – Mexican Revolution: One of the world's first naval/air skirmishes takes place off the coast of western Mexico.
1916 – World War I: The Battle of Verdun – German forces launch their third offensive of the battle.
1917 – World War I: The Battle of Arras – the battle begins with Canadian Corps executing a massive assault on Vimy Ridge.
1918 – World War I: The Battle of the Lys – the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps is crushed by the German forces during what is called the Spring Offensive on the Belgian region of Flanders.
1918 – The National Council of Bessarabia proclaims union with the Kingdom of Romania.
1937 – The Kamikaze arrives at Croydon Airport in London – it is the first Japanese-built aircraft to fly to Europe.
1939 – Marian Anderson sings at the Lincoln Memorial, after being denied the right to sing at the Daughters of the American Revolution's Constitution Hall.
1940 – World War II: Operation Weserübung – Germany invades Denmark and Norway.
1940 – Vidkun Quisling seizes power in Norway.
1942 – World War II: The Battle of Bataan/Bataan Death March – United States forces surrender on the Bataan Peninsula. The Japanese Navy launches an air raid on Trincomalee in Ceylon (Sri Lanka); Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Hermes and Royal Australian Navy Destroyer HMAS Vampire are sunk off the island's east coast.
1945 – World War II: The German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer is sunk.
1945 – World War II: The Battle of Königsberg, in East Prussia, ends.
1945 – The United States Atomic Energy Commission is formed.
1947 – The Glazier-Higgins-Woodward tornadoes kill 181 and injure 970 in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
1947 – The Journey of Reconciliation, the first interracial Freedom Ride begins through the upper South in violation of Jim Crow laws. The riders wanted enforcement of the United States Supreme Court's 1946 Irene Morgan decision that banned racial segregation in interstate travel.
1948 – Jorge Eliécer Gaitán's assassination provokes a violent riot in Bogotá (the Bogotazo), and a further ten years of violence in Colombia known as La violencia.
1948 – Fighters from the Irgun and Lehi Zionist paramilitary groups attacked Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, killing over 100.
1952 – Hugo Ballivian's government is overthrown by the Bolivian National Revolution, starting a period of agrarian reform, universal suffrage and the nationalisation of tin mines
1957 – The Suez Canal in Egypt is cleared and opens to shipping.
1959 – Project Mercury: NASA announces the selection of the United States' first seven astronauts, whom the news media quickly dub the "Mercury Seven".
1961 – The Pacific Electric Railway in Los Angeles, once the largest electric railway in the world, ends operations.
1965 – Astrodome opens. First indoor baseball game is played.
1967 – The first Boeing 737 (a 100 series) makes its maiden flight.
1969 – The "Chicago Eight" plead not guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.
1969 – The first British-built Concorde 002 makes its maiden flight from Filton to RAF Fairford.
1975 – The first game of the Philippine Basketball Association, the second oldest professional basketball league in the world.
1975 – 8 people in South Korea, who are involved in People's Revolutionary Party Incident, are hanged.
1980 – The Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein kills philosopher Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and his sister Bint al-Huda after three days of torture.
1981 – The U.S. Navy nuclear submarine USS George Washington (SSBN-598) accidentally collides with the Nissho Maru, a Japanese cargo ship, sinking it.
1989 – The April 9 tragedy in Tbilisi, Georgian SSR an anti-Soviet peaceful demonstration and hunger strikes, demanding restoration of Georgian independence is dispersed by the Soviet army, resulting in 20 deaths and hundreds of injuries.
1991 – Georgia declares independence from the Soviet Union
1992 – A U.S. Federal Court finds former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega guilty of drug and racketeering charges. He is sentenced to 30 years in prison.
1992 – John Major's Conservative Party wins an unprecedented fourth general election victory in the United Kingdom.
2003 – 2003 invasion of Iraq: Baghdad falls to American forces;Saddam Hussein statue topples as Iraqis turn on symbols of their former leader, pulling down the statue and tearing it to pieces.
2005 – Wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles; Charles, Prince of Wales marries Camilla Parker Bowles in a civil ceremony at Windsor's Guildhall.
2009 – In Tbilisi, Georgia, up to 60,000 people protest against the government of Mikheil Saakashvili.
2011 – A gunman murdered five people, injured eleven, and committed suicide in a mall in the Netherlands.


Roanoke Colony

The Roanoke Colony on Roanoke Island in Dare County, present-day North Carolina, United States was a late 16th-century attempt by Queen Elizabeth I to establish a permanent English settlement. The enterprise was financed and organized originally by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who drowned in 1583 during an aborted attempt to colonize St. John's, Newfoundland. Sir Humphrey Gilbert's half brother Sir Walter Raleigh would gain his brother's charter from Queen Elizabeth I and subsequently would execute the details of the charter through his delegates Ralph Lane and Richard Grenville, Raleigh's distant cousin.

The final group of colonists disappeared during the Anglo-Spanish War, three years after the last shipment of supplies from England. Their disappearance gave rise to the nickname "The Lost Colony."


Alaska Purchase

The Alaska Purchase was the acquisition of the Alaska territory by the United States from the Russian Empire in the year 1867 by a treaty ratified by the Senate.

Russia, fearing a war with Britain that would allow the British to seize Alaska, wanted to sell. Russia's major role had been forcing Native Alaskans to hunt for furs, and missionary work to convert them to Christianity. The United States added 586,412 square miles (1,518,800 km2) of new territory. Originally organized as the Department of Alaska, the area was successively the District of Alaska and the Alaska Territory before becoming the modern state of Alaska upon being admitted to the Union as a state in 1959.


Project Mercury

Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with two goals: putting a human in orbit around the Earth, and doing it before the Soviet Union, as part of the early space race. It succeeded in the first but not the second: in the first Mercury mission on 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space; however the Soviet Union had put Yuri Gagarin into space one month earlier. John Glenn became the first American to reach orbit on February 20, 1962, during the third manned Mercury flight. Glenn was the third person to reach orbit, following Gagarin and Soviet Titov.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 10

428 – Nestorius becomes Patriarch of Constantinople.
837 – Halley's Comet and Earth experienced their closest approach to one another when their separating distance equalled 0.0342 AU (3.2 million miles).
879 – Louis III and Carloman II become joint Kings of the Western Franks.
1407 – the lama Deshin Shekpa visits the Ming Dynasty capital at Nanjing. He is awarded with the title Great Treasure Prince of Dharma.
1500 – Ludovico Sforza is captured by the Swiss troops at Novara and is handed over to the French.
1606 – The Virginia Company of London is established by royal charter by James I of England with the purpose of establishing colonial settlements in North America.
1710 – The Statute of Anne, the first law regulating copyright, enters into force in Great Britain.
1741 – War of the Austrian Succession: Prussia defeats Austria in the Battle of Mollwitz.
1809 – Napoleonic Wars: The War of the Fifth Coalition begins when forces of the Austrian Empire invade Bavaria.
1815 – The Mount Tambora volcano begins a three-month-long eruption, lasting until July 15. The eruption ultimately kills 71,000 people and affects Earth's climate for the next two years.
1816 – The Federal government of the United States approves the creation of the Second Bank of the United States.
1821 – Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople is hanged by the Ottoman government from the main gate of the Patriarchate and his body is thrown into the Bosphorus.
1826 – The 10,500 inhabitants of the Greek town Missolonghi start leaving the town after a year's siege by Turkish forces. Very few of them survive.
1856 – The Theta Chi fraternity is founded at Norwich University in Vermont.
1858 – After the original Big Ben, a 14.5 tonne bell for the Palace of Westminster had cracked during testing, it is recast into the current 13.76 tonne bell by Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
1864 – Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg is proclaimed emperor of Mexico during the French intervention in Mexico.
1865 – American Civil War: A day after his surrender to Union forces, Confederate General Robert E. Lee addresses his troops for the last time.
1866 – The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) is founded in New York City by Henry Bergh.
1868 – At Arogee in Abyssinia, British and Indian forces defeat an army of Emperor Tewodros II. While 700 Ethiopians are killed and many more injured, only two die from the British/Indian troops.
1874 – The first Arbor Day is celebrated in Nebraska.
1887 – On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo XIII authorizes the establishment of The Catholic University of America.
1904 – British mystic Aleister Crowley transcribes the third and final chapter of The Book of The Law.
1912 – The Titanic leaves port in Southampton, England for her first and only voyage.
1916 – The Professional Golfers Association of America (PGA) is created in New York City.
1919 – Mexican Revolution leader Emiliano Zapata is ambushed and shot dead by government forces in Morelos.
1925 – The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is first published in New York City, by Charles Scribner's Sons.
1940 – Katyn massacre Mass execution of 40 thousands Polish officers and intelligentsia approved and signed by USSR leader Joseph Stalin
1941 – World War II: The Axis Powers in Europe establish the Independent State of Croatia from occupied Yugoslavia with Ante Pavelić's Ustaše fascist insurgents in power.
1944 – Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escape from the Birkenau death camp.
1953 – Warner Brothers premieres the first 3-D film from a major American studio, entitled House of Wax.
1957 – The Suez Canal is reopened for all shipping after being closed for three months.
1959 – Akihito, future Emperor of Japan, weds Michiko.
1963 – 129 American sailors die when the submarine USS Thresher sinks at sea.
1968 – Shipwreck of the New Zealand inter-island ferry TEV Wahine outside Wellington harbour.
1970 – Paul McCartney announces that he is leaving The Beatles for personal and professional reasons.
1971 – Ping Pong Diplomacy: In an attempt to thaw relations with the United States, the People's Republic of China hosts the U.S. table tennis team for a weeklong visit.
1972 – 20 days after he is kidnapped in Buenos Aires, Oberdan Sallustro is murdered by communist guerrillas.
1972 – Vietnam War: For the first time since November 1967, American B-52 bombers reportedly begin bombing North Vietnam.
1972 – Seventy-four nations sign the Biological Weapons Convention, the first multilateral disarmament treaty banning the production of biological weapons.
1973 – A British Vanguard turboprop crashes during a snowstorm at Basel, Switzerland killing 104.
1979 – Red River Valley Tornado Outbreak: A tornado lands in Wichita Falls, Texas killing 42 people.
1991 – Italian ferry Moby Prince collides with an oil tanker in dense fog off Livorno, Italy killing 140.
1991 – A rare tropical storm develops in the South Atlantic Ocean near Angola; the first to be documented by satellites.
1992 – The Maraghar Massacre, killing of ethnic Armenian civil population of the village Maraghar by Azerbaijani troops during the Nagorno-Karabakh War.
2009 – President of Fiji Ratu Josefa Iloilo announces he will suspend the constitution and assume all governance in the country, creating a constitutional crisis.
2010 – Polish Air Force Tu-154M crashes near Smolensk, Russia, killing all 96 people on board including President Lech Kaczyński.


Halley's Comet

Halley's calculations enabled the comet's earlier appearances to be found in the historical record. The following table sets out the astronomical designations for every apparition of Halley's Comet from 240 BCE, the earliest documented widespread sighting. For example, "1P/1982 U1, 1986 III, 1982i" indicates that for the perihelion in 1986, Halley's Comet was the first period comet known (designated 1P) and this apparition was the first seen in "half-month" U (the first half of November) in 1982 (giving 1P/1982 U1); it was the third comet past perihelion in 1986 (1986 III); and it was the ninth comet spotted in 1982 (provisional designation 1982i). The perihelion dates of each apparition are shown. The perihelion dates farther from the present are approximate, mainly because of uncertainties in the modeling of non-gravitational effects. Perihelion dates 1607 and later are in the Gregorian calendar, while perihelion dates of 1531 and earlier are in the Julian calendar.

1P/−239 K1, −239 (25 May 240 BCE)
1P/−163 U1, −163 (12 November 164 BCE)
1P/−86 Q1, −86 (6 August 87 BCE)
1P/−11 Q1, −11 (10 October 12 BCE)
1P/66 B1, 66 (25 January 66 CE)
1P/141 F1, 141 (22 March 141)
1P/218 H1, 218 (17 May 218)
1P/295 J1, 295 (20 April 295)
1P/374 E1, 374 (16 February 374)
1P/451 L1, 451 (28 June 451)
1P/530 Q1, 530 (27 September 530)
1P/607 H1, 607 (15 March 607)
1P/684 R1, 684 (2 October 684)
1P/760 K1, 760 (20 May 760)
1P/837 F1, 837 (28 February 837)
1P/912 J1, 912 (18 July 912)
1P/989 N1, 989 (5 September 989)
1P/1066 G1, 1066 (20 March 1066)
1P/1145 G1, 1145 (18 April 1145)
1P/1222 R1, 1222 (28 September 1222)
1P/1301 R1, 1301 (25 October 1301)
1P/1378 S1, 1378 (10 November 1378)
1P/1456 K1, 1456 (9 June 1456)
1P/1531 P1, 1531 (26 August 1531)
1P/1607 S1, 1607 (27 October 1607)
1P/1682 Q1, 1682 (15 September 1682)
1P/1758 Y1, 1759 I (13 March 1759)
1P/1835 P1, 1835 III (16 November 1835)
1P/1909 R1, 1910 II, 1909c (20 April 1910)
1P/1982 U1, 1986 III, 1982i (9 February 1986)
Next perihelion predicted 28 July 2061


More news on Duke the Menace http://www.free-dc.org/forum/showthr...l=1#post165038

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 11

491 – Flavius Anastasius becomes Byzantine Emperor, with the name of Anastasius I.
1079 – Bishop Stanislaus of Kraków is executed by order of Bolesław II of Poland.
1241 – Batu Khan defeats Béla IV of Hungary at the Battle of Muhi.
1512 – War of the League of Cambrai: French forces led by Gaston de Foix win the Battle of Ravenna.
1544 – French forces defeat a Spanish army at the Battle of Ceresole.
1689 – William III and Mary II are crowned as joint sovereigns of Britain.
1713 – War of the Spanish Succession (Queen Anne's War): Treaty of Utrecht.
1727 – Premiere of Johann Sebastian Bach's St Matthew Passion BWV 244b at the St. Thomas Church, Leipzig
1775 – The last execution for witchcraft in Germany takes place.
1809 – Battle of the Basque Roads Naval battle fought between France and the United Kingdom
1814 – The Treaty of Fontainebleau ends the War of the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon Bonaparte, and forces him to abdicate unconditionally for the first time.
1856 – Battle of Rivas: Juan Santamaria burns down the hostel where William Walker's filibusters are holed up.
1868 – Former Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu surrenders Edo Castle to Imperial forces, marking the end of the Tokugawa shogunate.
1876 – The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks is organized.
1881 – Spelman College is founded in Atlanta, Georgia as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, an institute of higher education for African-American women.
1888 – The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam is inaugurated.
1908 – SMS Blücher, the last armored cruiser to be built by the German Imperial Navy, launches.
1913 – The Nevill Ground's pavilion is destroyed in a suffragette arson attack becoming the only cricket ground to be attacked by suffragettes.
1919 – The International Labour Organization is founded.
1921 – Emir Abdullah establishes the first centralised government in the newly created British protectorate of Transjordan.
1945 – World War II: American forces liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp.
1951 – Korean War: President Harry Truman relieves General of the Army Douglas MacArthur of overall command in Korea.
1951 – The Stone of Scone, the stone upon which Scottish monarchs were traditionally crowned, is found on the site of the altar of Arbroath Abbey. It had been taken by Scottish nationalist students from its place in Westminster Abbey.
1952 – The Battle of Nanri Island takes place.
1954 – The most boring day since 1900 according to the True Knowledge Answer Engine
1955 – The Air India Kashmir Princess is bombed and crashes in a failed assassination attempt on Zhou Enlai by the Kuomintang.
1957 – United Kingdom agrees to Singaporean self-rule.
1961 – The trial of Adolf Eichmann begins in Jerusalem.
1963 – Pope John XXIII issues Pacem in Terris, the first encyclical addressed to all instead of to Catholics alone.
1965 – The Palm Sunday tornado outbreak of 1965: Fifty-one tornadoes hit in six Midwestern states, killing 256 people.
1968 – President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing.
1970 – Apollo 13 is launched.
1972 – First edition of the BBC comedy panel game I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue is broadcast, one of the longest running British radio shows in history.
1976 – The Apple I is created.
1977 – London Transport's Silver Jubilee buses are launched.
1979 – Ugandan dictator Idi Amin is deposed.
1981 – A massive riot in Brixton, South London, results in almost 300 police injuries and 65 serious civilian injuries.
1987 – The London Agreement is secretly signed between Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Shimon Peres and King Hussein of Jordan.
1989 – Ron Hextall becomes the first goaltender in NHL history to score a goal in the playoffs.
1990 – Customs officers in Middlesbrough, England, United Kingdom, say they have seized what they believe to be the barrel of a massive gun on a ship bound for Iraq.
1993 – 450 prisoners rioted at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, Ohio, and continued to do so for ten days, citing grievances related to prison conditions, as well as the forced vaccination of Nation of Islam prisoners (for tuberculosis) against their religious beliefs.
2001 – The detained crew of a United States EP-3E aircraft that landed in Hainan, China after a collision with a J-8 fighter is released.
2002 – The Ghriba synagogue bombing by Al Qaeda kills 21 in Tunisia.
2002 – Over two hundred thousand people marched in Caracas towards the Presidential Palace of Miraflores, to demand the resignation of president Hugo Chávez. 19 of the protesters are killed, and the Minister of Defense Gral. Lucas Rincon announced Hugo Chávez resignation on national TV.
2006 – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announces that Iran has successfully enriched uranium.
2007 – 2007 Algiers bombings: Two bombings in the Algerian capital of Algiers, kills 33 people and wounds a further 222 others.
2011 – 2011 Minsk Metro bombing
2012 – A magnitude 8.2 earthquake hit Indonesia, off northern Sumatra at a depth of 16.4 km. After that there are still more continuation earthquake. Tsunami had hit the island of Nias at Indonesia.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks

The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE; also often known as the Elks Lodge or simply The Elks) is an American fraternal order and social club founded in 1868. It is one of the leading fraternal orders in the U.S., claiming nearly one million members.

The Elks had modest beginnings in 1868 as a social club (then called the "Jolly Corks") established as a private club to elude New York City laws governing the opening hours of public taverns. After the death of a member left his wife and children without income, the club took up additional service roles, rituals and a new name. Desiring to adopt "a readily identifiable creature of stature, indigenous to America," fifteen members voted 8–7 in favor of the elk above the buffalo. Early members were mostly from theatrical performing troupes in New York City. It has since evolved into a major American fraternal, charitable, and service order with more than a million members, both men and women, throughout the United States and the former territories of the Philippines and the Panama Canal.

When founded, membership in the BPOE was denied to blacks. Because of this policy, an unaffiliated, primarily black organization modeled on the BPOE was formed in 1898. This "Improved Benevolent Protective Order of the Elks of the World" (IBPOEW) remains a separate organization to this day. Membership in the BPOE was opened to African Americans in the 1970s, although the Winter Haven, Florida Elks Club was famously segregated as late as 1985, when Boston Red Sox Coach Tommy Harper protested a Red Sox policy of permitting them into the spring training clubhouse to issue lodge clubroom invitations to white players only. Women were permitted to join in the mid-1990s, but currently atheists are excluded. The opening of membership to women was mandated by the Oregon Public Accommodations Act, which was found by an appeals court to apply to the BPOE, and it has been speculated that the religious restriction might be litigated on the same basis. A year after the national organization changed its policy to allow women to join, the Vermont Supreme Court ordered punitive damages of $5,000 for each of seven women whom a local chapter had rejected citing other reasons. Current members are required to be U.S. citizens over the age of 21 and believe in God.


Buchenwald concentration camp

Buchenwald concentration camp (German: Konzentrationslager (KZ) Buchenwald, IPA: [ˈbuːxənvalt]; literally, in English: beech forest) was a German Nazi concentration camp established on the Ettersberg (Etter Mountain) near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937, one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps on German soil.

Camp prisoners from all over Europe and the Soviet Union—Jews, non-Jewish Poles and Slovenes, the mentally ill and physically-disabled from birth defects, religious and political prisoners, Roma and Sinti, Freemasons, Jehovah's Witnesses, criminals, homosexuals, and prisoners of war— worked primarily as forced labor in local armament factories. From 1945 to 1950, the camp was used by the Soviet occupation authorities as an internment camp, known as NKVD special camp number 2.

Today the remains of Buchenwald serves as a memorial and permanent exhibition and museum.


Apollo 13

The mission was launched at the planned time, 02:13:00 PM EST (19:13:00 UTC) on April 11. An anomaly occurred when the second-stage, center (inboard) engine shut down about two minutes early. The four outboard engines and the third-stage engine burned longer to compensate, and the vehicle achieved very close to the planned circular 100 nautical miles (190 km) parking orbit, followed by a normal translunar injection about two hours later. The engine shutdown was determined to be caused by severe pogo oscillations measured at a strength of 68 g and a frequency of 16 hertz, flexing the thrust frame by 3 inches (76 mm). The vehicle's guidance system shut the engine down in response to sensed thrust chamber pressure fluctuations. Pogo oscillations had been seen on previous Titan rockets, and also on the Saturn V during Apollo 6, but on Apollo 13 they were amplified by an unexpected interaction with turbopump cavitation. Later missions implemented anti-pogo modifications that had been under development. These included addition of a helium gas reservoir to the center engine liquid oxygen line to dampen pressure oscillations, an automatic cutoff as a backup, and simplification of the propellant valves of all five second-stage engines.

The crew performed the separation and transposition maneuver to dock the CM Odyssey to the LM Aquarius, and pulled away from the spent third stage, which ground controllers then sent on a course to impact the Moon in range of a seismometer placed on surface by Apollo 12. They then settled in for the three-day trip to Fra Mauro.


Apple I

The original Apple Computer, also known retroactively as the Apple I, or Apple-1, is a personal computer released by the Apple Computer Company (now Apple Inc.) in 1976. They were designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak. Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs had the idea of selling the computer. The Apple I was Apple's first product, and to finance its creation, Jobs sold his only means of transportation, a VW Microbus and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator for $500. It was demonstrated in July 1976 at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, California.

The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 at a price of US$666.66, because Wozniak "liked repeating digits" and because they originally sold it to a local shop for $500 plus a one-third markup. About 200 units were produced. Unlike other hobbyist computers of its day, which were sold as kits, the Apple I was a fully assembled circuit board containing about 60+ chips. However, to make a working computer, users still had to add a case, power supply transformers, power switch, ASCII keyboard, and composite video display. An optional board providing a cassette interface for storage was later released at a cost of $72.

The Apple I's built-in computer terminal circuitry was distinctive. All one needed was a keyboard and an inexpensive television set. Competing machines such as the Altair 8800 generally were programmed with front-mounted toggle switches and used indicator lights (red LEDs, most commonly) for output, and had to be extended with separate hardware to allow connection to a computer terminal or a teletypewriter machine. This made the Apple I an innovative machine for its day. In April 1977 the price was dropped to $475. It continued to be sold through August 1977, despite the introduction of the Apple II in April 1977, which began shipping in June of that year. Apple dropped the Apple I from its price list by October 1977, officially discontinuing it. As Wozniak was the only person who could answer most customer support questions about the computer, the company offered Apple I owners discounts and trade-ins for Apple IIs to persuade them to return their computers, contributing to their scarcity. In 1976, Concord High School Junior Wai Lee assembled one of the first 12 Apple Is (no serial number), the first Apple Computer in an aluminum housing.


2012 Indian Ocean earthquakes

The 2012 Indian Ocean earthquakes were magnitude 8.6 and 8.2 Mw undersea earthquakes that struck near the Indonesian province of Aceh on Wednesday, April 11, 2012, at 15:38 local time. Initially, authorities feared that the initial earthquake would cause a tsunami and warnings were issued across the Indian Ocean; however, these warnings were subsequently cancelled. The earthquake was the 13th strongest earthquake since 1900, an unusually strong intraplate earthquake, and the largest strike-slip earthquake ever recorded.

A magnitude 8.2 aftershock struck at a depth of 16.4 kilometres (10.2 mi) about 430 km (267 mi) southwest of Banda Aceh at 10:43 UTC, two hours after the initial earthquake. Many aftershocks with magnitude readings between 5.0 to 6.0 were recorded for several hours after the initial earthquake which hit the west coast of northern Sumatra. Since the initial magnitude 8.6 earthquake, there have been 111 aftershocks over magnitude 4.0 according to USGS, including a magnitude 6.2 on April 15, 2012.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 12

238 – Gordian II loses the Battle of Carthage against the Numidian forces loyal to Maximinus Thrax and is killed. Gordian I, his father, commits suicide.
467 – Anthemius is elevated to Emperor of the Western Roman Empire.
1204 – The Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade breach the walls of Constantinople and enter the city, which they completely occupy the following day.
1557 – Cuenca is founded in Ecuador.
1606 – The Union Flag is adopted as the flag of English and Scottish ships.
1776 – American Revolution: With the Halifax Resolves, the North Carolina Provincial Congress authorizes its Congressional delegation to vote for independence from Britain.
1820 – Alexander Ypsilantis is declared leader of Filiki Eteria, a secret organization to overthrow Ottoman rule over Greece.
1831 – Soldiers marching on the Broughton Suspension Bridge in Manchester, England cause it to collapse.
1861 – American Civil War: The war begins with Confederate forces firing on Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
1862 – American Civil War: The Andrews Raid (the Great Locomotive Chase) occurred, starting from Big Shanty, Georgia (now Kennesaw).
1864 – American Civil War: The Fort Pillow massacre: Confederate forces kill most of the African American soldiers that surrendered at Fort Pillow, Tennessee.
1865 – American Civil War: Mobile, Alabama, falls to the Union Army.
1877 – The United Kingdom annexes the Transvaal.
1910 – The SMS Zrinyi, one of the last pre-dreadnoughts built by the Austro-Hungarian Navy, is launched.
1917 – World War I: Canadian forces successfully complete the taking of Vimy Ridge from the Germans.
1927 – April 12 Incident: Chiang Kai-shek orders the Communist Party of China members executed in Shanghai, ending the First United Front.
1928 –The Bremen, a German Junkers W33 type aircraft, takes off for the first successful transatlantic aeroplane flight from east to west.
1934 – The strongest surface wind gust in the world at 231 mph, is measured on the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire.
1934 – The U.S. Auto-Lite Strike begins, culminating in a five-day melee between Ohio National Guard troops and 6,000 strikers and picketers.
1935 – First flight of the Bristol Blenheim.
1937 – Sir Frank Whittle ground-tests the first jet engine designed to power an aircraft, at Rugby, England.
1945 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies while in office; vice-president Harry Truman is sworn in as the 33rd President.
1955 – The polio vaccine, developed by Dr. Jonas Salk, is declared safe and effective.
1961 – The Russian (Soviet) cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to travel into outer space and perform the first manned orbital flight, in Vostok 3KA-2 (Vostok 1).
1963 – The Soviet nuclear-powered submarine K-33 collides with the Finnish merchant vessel M/S Finnclipper in the Danish straits.
1968 – Nerve gas accident at Skull Valley, Utah.
1970 – Soviet submarine K-8, carrying four nuclear torpedoes, sinks in the Bay of Biscay four days after a fire on board.
1980 – Samuel Doe takes control of Liberia in a coup d'état, ending over 130 years of minority Americo-Liberian rule over the country.
1980 – Terry Fox begins his "Marathon of Hope" at St. John's, Newfoundland.
1981 – The first launch of a Space Shuttle (Columbia) takes place - the STS-1 mission.
1990 – Jim Gary's "Twentieth Century Dinosaurs" exhibition opens at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
1992 – The Euro Disney Resort officially opens with its theme park Euro Disneyland. The resort and its park's name are subsequently changed to Disneyland Paris.
1994 – Canter & Siegel post the first commercial mass Usenet spam.
1998 – An earthquake in Slovenia, measuring 5.6 on the Richter scale occurs near the town of Bovec.
1999 – US President Bill Clinton is cited for contempt of court for giving "intentionally false statements" in a sexual harassment civil lawsuit.
2002 – A female suicide bomber detonated at the entrance to Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda open-air market, killing 7 and wounding 104.
2007 – A suicide bomber penetrates the Green Zone and detonates in a cafeteria within a parliament building, killing Iraqi MP Mohammed Awad and wounding more than twenty other people.
2009 – Zimbabwe officially abandons the Zimbabwe Dollar as their official currency.
2010 – A train derails near Merano, Italy, after running into a landslide, causing nine deaths and injuring 28 people.


Broughton Suspension Bridge

Broughton Suspension Bridge was a suspended-deck suspension bridge built in 1826 to span the River Irwell between Broughton and Pendleton, now in Salford, Greater Manchester, England. It was one of the first suspension bridges constructed in Europe. On 12 April 1831, the bridge collapsed, reportedly owing to mechanical resonance induced by troops marching over the bridge in step. A bolt in one of the stay-chains snapped, causing the bridge to collapse at one end, throwing about 40 of the men into the river. As a result of the incident, the British Army issued an order that troops should "break step" when crossing a bridge.

The bridge's construction has been attributed to Samuel Brown, but this has been questioned. Some sources have suggested that it may have been built by Thomas Cheek Hewes, a Manchester millwright and textile machinery manufacturer.

The bridge was rebuilt and strengthened after the collapse but was propped with temporary piles whenever a large crowd was expected. In 1924, it was replaced by a Pratt truss footbridge, which is still in use.


Battle of Fort Pillow

The Battle of Fort Pillow, also known as the Fort Pillow Massacre, was fought on April 12, 1864, at Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River in Henning, Tennessee, during the American Civil War. The battle ended with a massacre of surrendered Federal black troops by soldiers under the command of Confederate Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Military historian David J. Eicher concluded, "Fort Pillow marked one of the bleakest, saddest events of American military history."


Polio vaccine

Two polio vaccines are used throughout the world to combat poliomyelitis (or polio). The first was developed by Jonas Salk and first tested in 1952. Announced to the world by Salk on April 12, 1955, it consists of an injected dose of inactivated (dead) poliovirus. An oral vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin using attenuated poliovirus. Human trials of Sabin's vaccine began in 1957 and it was licensed in 1962. Because there is no long term carrier state for poliovirus in immunocompetent individuals, polioviruses have no non-primate reservoir in nature, and survival of the virus in the environment for an extended period of time appears to be remote. Therefore, interruption of person to person transmission of the virus by vaccination is the critical step in global polio eradication. The two vaccines have eradicated polio from most countries in the world, and reduced the worldwide incidence from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to 1,652 cases in 2007.


Vostok 1

Vostok 1 (Russian: Восток-1, East 1 or Orient 1) was the first spaceflight in the Vostok program and the first human spaceflight in history. The Vostok 3KA spacecraft was launched on April 12, 1961. The flight took Yuri Gagarin, a cosmonaut from the Soviet Union, into space. The flight marked the first time that a human entered outer space, as well as the first orbital flight of a manned vehicle. Vostok 1 was launched by the Soviet space program, and was designed by Soviet engineers guided by Sergei Korolev under the supervision of Kerim Kerimov and others.

The spaceflight consisted of a single orbit of the Earth (to this date the shortest orbital manned spaceflight). According to official records, the spaceflight took 108 minutes from launch to landing. As planned, Gagarin landed separately from his spacecraft, having ejected with a parachute 7 km (23,000 ft) above ground. Due to the secrecy surrounding the Soviet space program at the time, many details of the spaceflight only came to light years later, and several details in the original press releases turned out to be false.


STS-1

STS-1 was the first orbital flight of NASA's Space Shuttle program. Space Shuttle Columbia launched on 12 April 1981, and returned to Earth on 14 April, having orbited the Earth 37 times during its 54.5-hour mission. Columbia carried a crew of two – mission commander John W. Young and pilot Robert L. Crippen. It was the first American manned space flight since the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project on 15 July 1975. STS-1 was also the only US manned maiden test flight of a new spacecraft system, although it was the culmination of atmospheric testing of the Space Shuttle orbiter.

[Duke of Buckingham]

I will be out for about a week. Come and post something in here please.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 13

1111 – Henry V is crowned Holy Roman Emperor.
1204 – Constantinople falls to the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade, temporarily ending the Byzantine Empire.
1598 – Henry IV of France issues the Edict of Nantes, allowing freedom of religion to the Huguenots. (Edict repealed in 1685.)
1612 – Miyamoto Musashi defeats Sasaki Kojirō at Funajima island.
1613 – Samuel Argall captures Native American princess Pocahontas in Passapatanzy, Virginia to ransom her for some English prisoners held by her father. She is brought to Henricus as hostage.
1742 – George Frideric Handel's oratorio Messiah makes its world-premiere in Dublin, Ireland.
1777 – American Revolutionary War: American forces are surprised in the Battle of Bound Brook, New Jersey.
1796 – The first elephant ever seen in the United States arrives from India.
1829 – The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 gives Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom the right to vote and to sit in Parliament.
1849 – Hungary becomes a republic.
1861 – American Civil War: Fort Sumter surrenders to Confederate forces.
1868 – The Abyssinian War ends as British and Indian troops capture Maqdala.
1870 – The New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art is founded.
1873 – The Colfax Massacre takes place.
1902 – James C. Penney opens his first store in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
1909 – The Turkish military reverses the Ottoman countercoup of 1909 to force the overthrow of Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
1919 – The establishment of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea.
1919 – Jallianwala Bagh massacre: British troops massacre at least 379 unarmed demonstrators in Amritsar, India. At least 1200 are wounded.
1919 – Eugene V. Debs is imprisoned at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, for speaking out against the draft during World War I.
1941 – Pact of neutrality between the USSR and Japan is signed.
1943 – World War II: The discovery of a mass grave of Polish prisoners of war killed by Soviet forces in the Katyń Forest Massacre is announced, causing a diplomatic rift between the Polish government in exile in London from the Soviet Union, which denies responsibility.
1943 – The Jefferson Memorial is dedicated in Washington, D.C., on the 200th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth.
1944 – Diplomatic relations between New Zealand and the Soviet Union are established.
1945 – World War II: German troops kill more than 1,000 political and military prisoners in Gardelegen, Germany.
1945 – World War II: Soviet and Bulgarian forces capture Vienna, Austria.
1948 – The Hadassah medical convoy massacre: In an ambush, 79 Jewish doctors, nurses and medical students from Hadassah Hospital and a British soldier are massacred by Arabs in Sheikh Jarra near Jerusalem.
1953 – CIA director Allen Dulles launches the mind-control program MKULTRA.
1958 – During the Cold War, American Van Cliburn wins the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
1960 – The United States launches Transit 1-B, the world's first satellite navigation system.
1964 – At the Academy Awards, Sidney Poitier becomes the first African-American male to win the Best Actor award for the 1963 film Lilies of the Field.
1970 – An oxygen tank aboard Apollo 13 explodes, putting the crew in great danger and causing major damage to the spacecraft while en route to the Moon.
1972 – The Universal Postal Union decides to recognize the People's Republic of China as the only legitimate Chinese representative, effectively expelling the Republic of China administering Taiwan.
1972 – Vietnam War: The Battle of An Lộc begins.
1974 – Western Union (in cooperation with NASA and Hughes Aircraft) launches the United States' first commercial geosynchronous communications satellite, Westar 1.
1975 – Bus massacre in Lebanon: An attack by the Phalangist resistance kills 26 militia members of the P.F.L. of Palestine, marking the start of the 15-year Lebanese Civil War.
1976 – The United States Treasury Department reintroduces the two-dollar bill as a Federal Reserve Note on Thomas Jefferson's 233rd birthday as part of the United States Bicentennial celebration.
1984 – India moves into Siachen Glacier thus annexing more territory from the Line of Control.
1987 – Portugal and the People's Republic of China sign an agreement in which Macau would be returned to China in 1999.
1992 – The Great Chicago Flood.
1997 – Tiger Woods becomes the youngest golfer to win the Masters Tournament.
2009 – Andrew Hussie releases first page of Homestuck, marking the 13th birthday of fictional character John Egbert.


Macau

Macau (Chinese: 澳門), also spelled Macao (pron.: /məˈkaʊ/), is one of the two special administrative regions of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the other being Hong Kong. Macau lies on the western side of the Pearl River Delta across from Hong Kong to the east, bordered by Guangdong province to the north and facing the South China Sea to the east and south.[6] The territory's economy is heavily dependent on gambling and tourism, but also includes manufacturing.

A former Portuguese colony, Macau was administered by Portugal from the mid-16th century until 1999, when it was the last remaining European colony in China. Portuguese traders first settled in Macau in the 1550s. In 1557, Macau was rented to Portugal by the Chinese empire as a trading port. The Portuguese administered the city under Chinese authority and sovereignty until 1887, when Macau became a colony of the Portuguese empire. Sovereignty over Macau was transferred back to China on 20 December 1999. The Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration and the Basic Law of Macau stipulate that Macau operate with a high degree of autonomy until at least 2049, fifty years after the transfer.

Under the policy of "one country, two systems", the PRC's Central People's Government is responsible for the territory's defense and foreign affairs, while Macau maintains its own legal system, police force, monetary system, customs policy, and immigration policy. Macau participates in many international organizations and events that do not require members to possess national sovereignty.

According to The World Factbook, Macau has the second highest life expectancy in the world. In addition, Macau is one of the very few regions in Asia with a "very high Human Development Index", ranking 23rd or 24th in the world in 2007 (with Japan being the highest in Asia; the other Asian countries/regions within the "very high HDI" category are Taiwan, Hong Kong, Brunei, Qatar, Singapore, Israel and South Korea).

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 14

43 BC – Battle of Forum Gallorum: Mark Antony, besieging Caesar's assassin Decimus Brutus in Mutina, defeats the forces of the consul Pansa, but is then immediately defeated by the army of the other consul, Hirtius.
69 – Vitellius, commander of the Rhine armies, defeats Emperor Otho in the Battle of Bedriacum and seizes the throne.
70 – Siege of Jerusalem: Titus, son of emperor Vespasian, surrounds the Jewish capital, with four Roman legions.
193 – Septimius Severus is proclaimed Roman Emperor by the army in Illyricum (in the Balkans).
966 – After his marriage to the Christian Dobrawa of Bohemia, the pagan ruler of the Polans, Mieszko I, converts to Christianity, an event considered to be the founding of the Polish state.
1028 – Henry III, son of Conrad, is elected king of the Germans.
1205 – Battle of Adrianople between Bulgarians and Crusaders.
1294 – Temür, grandson of Kublai, is elected Khagan of the Mongols and Emperor of the Yuan Dynasty with the reigning titles Oljeitu and Chengzong.
1341 – Sack of Saluzzo (Italy) by Italian-Angevine troops under Manfred V of Saluzzo.
1434 – The foundation stone of Cathedral St. Peter and St. Paul in Nantes, France is laid.
1471 – In England, the Yorkists under Edward IV defeat the Lancastrians under the Earl of Warwick at the Battle of Barnet; the Earl is killed and Edward IV resumes the throne.
1639 – Imperial forces are defeated by the Swedes at the Battle of Chemnitz. The Swedish victory prolongs the Thirty Year's War and allows them to advance into Bohemia.
1699 – Khalsa: The Sikh Religion was formalised as the Khalsa - the brotherhood of Warrior-Saints - by Guru Gobind Singh in Northern India, in accordance with the Nanakshahi calendar.
1715 – The Yamasee War begins in South Carolina.
1775 – The first abolition society in North America is established. The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage is organized in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush.
1816 – Bussa, a slave in British-ruled Barbados, leads a slave rebellion and is killed. For this, he is remembered as the first national hero of Barbados.
1828 – Noah Webster copyrights the first edition of his dictionary.
1846 – The Donner Party of pioneers departs Springfield, Illinois, for California, on what will become a year-long journey of hardship, cannibalism, and survival.
1849 – Hungary declares itself independent of Austria with Lajos Kossuth as its leader.
1860 – The first Pony Express rider reaches Sacramento, California.
1865 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is shot in Ford's Theatre by John Wilkes Booth (died April 15th).
1865 – U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward and his family are attacked in his home by Lewis Powell.
1881 – The Four Dead in Five Seconds Gunfight is fought in El Paso, Texas.
1890 – The Pan-American Union is founded by the First International Conference of American States in Washington, D.C.
1894 – The first ever commercial motion picture house opened in New York City using ten Kinetoscopes, a device for peep-show viewing of films.
1906 – The Azusa Street Revival opens and will launch Pentecostalism as a worldwide movement.
1909 – A massacre is organized by Ottoman Empire against Armenian population of Cilicia.
1912 – The British passenger liner RMS Titanic hits an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11:40pm (sinks morning of April 15th).
1927 – The first Volvo car premieres in Gothenburg, Sweden.
1928 –The Bremen, a German Junkers W33 type aircraft, reaches Greenly Island, Canada - the first successful transatlantic aeroplane flight from east to west.
1931 – Spanish Cortes depose King Alfonso XIII and proclaims the 2nd Spanish Republic.
1931 – First edition of the Highway Code published in Great Britain.
1935 – "Black Sunday Storm", the worst dust storm of the U.S. Dust Bowl.
1939 – The Grapes of Wrath, by American author John Steinbeck is first published by the Viking Press.
1940 – World War II: Royal Marines land in Namsos, Norway in preparation for a larger force to arrive two days later.
1941 – World War II: The Ustashe, a Croatian far-right organization is put in charge of the Independent State of Croatia by the Axis Powers after the Axis Operation 25 invasion.
1941 – World War II: Rommel attacks Tobruk.
1942 – Malta received the George Cross for its gallantry. The George Cross was given by King George VI himself and is now an emblem on the Maltese national flag.
1944 – Bombay Explosion: A massive explosion in Bombay harbor kills 300 and causes economic damage valued then at 20 million pounds.
1945 – Osijek, Croatia, is liberated from fascist occupation.
1956 – In Chicago, Illinois, videotape is first demonstrated.
1958 – The Soviet satellite Sputnik 2 falls from orbit after a mission duration of 162 days.
1967 – Gnassingbé Eyadéma overthrows President of Togo Nicolas Grunitzky and installs himself as the new president, a title he would hold for the next 38 years.
1969 – At the U.S. Academy Awards there is a tie for the Academy Award for Best Actress between Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand.
1978 – 1978 Tbilisi Demonstrations: Thousands of Georgians demonstrate against Soviet attempts to change the constitutional status of the Georgian language.
1981 – STS-1 – The first operational space shuttle, Columbia (OV-102) completes its first test flight.
1986 – In retaliation for the April 5 bombing in West Berlin that killed two U.S. servicemen, U.S. president Ronald Reagan orders major bombing raids against Libya, killing 60 people.
1986 – 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) hailstones fall on the Gopalganj district of Bangladesh, killing 92. These are the heaviest hailstones ever recorded.
1988 – The USS Samuel B. Roberts strikes a mine in the Persian Gulf during Operation Earnest Will.
1988 – In a United Nations ceremony in Geneva, Switzerland, the Soviet Union signs an agreement pledging to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.
1991 – The Republic of Georgia introduces the post of President after its declaration of independence from the Soviet Union.
1994 – In a U.S. friendly fire incident during Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq, two United States Air Force aircraft mistakenly shoot-down two United States Army helicopters, killing 26 people.
1999 – NATO mistakenly bombs a convoy of ethnic Albanian refugees – Yugoslav officials say 75 people are killed.
1999 – A severe hailstorm strikes Sydney, Australia causing A$2.3 billion in insured damages, the most costly natural disaster in Australian history.
2002 – Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez returns to office two days after being ousted and arrested by the country's military.
2003 – The Human Genome Project is completed with 99% of the human genome sequenced to an accuracy of 99.99%.
2003 – U.S. troops in Baghdad capture Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestinian group that killed an American on the hijacked cruise liner the MS Achille Lauro in 1985.
2005 – The Oregon Supreme Court nullifies marriage licenses issued to gay couples a year earlier by Multnomah County.
2007 – At least 200,000 demonstrators in Ankara, Turkey protest against the possible candidacy of incumbent Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
2010 – Nearly 2,700 are killed in a magnitude 6.9 earthquake in Yushu, Qinghai, China.


Human Genome Project

The Human Genome Project (HGP) is an international scientific research project with a primary goal of determining the sequence of chemical base pairs which make up DNA, and of identifying and mapping the approximately 20,000–25,000 genes of the human genome from both a physical and functional standpoint.

The first official funding for the Project originated with the Department of Energy’s Office of Health and Environmental Research, headed by Charles DeLisi, and was in the Reagan Administration’s 1987 budget submission to the Congress. It subsequently passed both Houses. The Project was planned for 15 years.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 15

769 – The Lateran Council condemned the Council of Hieria and anathematized its iconoclastic rulings.
1071 – Bari, the last Byzantine possession in southern Italy, is surrendered to Robert Guiscard.
1395 – Tokhtamysh–Timur war: Battle of the Terek River: Timur defeats Tokhtamysh of the Golden Horde at the Volga. The Golden Horde capital city, Sarai, is razed to the ground and Timur installs a puppet ruler on the Golden Horde throne. Tokhtamysh escapes to Lithuania.
1450 – Battle of Formigny: Toward the end of the Hundred Years' War, the French attack and nearly annihilate English forces, ending English domination in Northern France.
1632 – Battle of Rain: Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus defeat the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years' War.
1638 – Tokugawa shogunate forces put down the Shimabara Rebellion when they retake Hara Castle from the rebels.
1642 – Irish Confederate Wars: A Confederate Irish militia is routed in the Battle of Kilrush when it attempts to halt the progress of a Parliamentarian army.
1715 – The Pocotaligo Massacre triggers the start of the Yamasee War in colonial South Carolina.
1738 – Serse, an Italian opera by George Frideric Handel receives its premiere performance in London, England.
1755 – Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language is published in London.
1783 – Preliminary articles of peace ending the American Revolutionary War (or American War of Independence) are ratified.
1802 – William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy see a "long belt" of daffodils, inspiring the former to pen I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.
1817 – Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc founded the American School for the Deaf, the first American school for deaf students, in Hartford, Connecticut.
1861 – President Abraham Lincoln calls for 75,000 Volunteers to quell the insurrection that soon became the American Civil War
1865 – Abraham Lincoln dies after being shot the previous evening by actor John Wilkes Booth.
1892 – The General Electric Company is formed.
RMS Titanic disaster.
1896 – Closing ceremony of the Games of the I Olympiad in Athens, Greece.
1900 – Philippine–American War: Filipino guerrillas launch a surprise attack on U.S. infantry and begin a four-day siege of Catubig, Philippines.
1912 – The British passenger liner RMS Titanic sinks in the North Atlantic at 2:20 a.m., two hours and forty minutes after hitting an iceberg. Only 710 of 2,227 passengers and crew on board survive.
1920 – Two security guards are murdered during a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti would be convicted of and executed for the crime, amid much controversy.
1921 – Black Friday: mine owners announce more wage and price cuts, leading to the threat of a strike all across England.
1922 – U.S. Senator John B. Kendrick of Wyoming introduces a resolution calling for an investigation of secret land deal, which leads to the discovery of the Teapot Dome scandal.
1923 – Insulin becomes generally available for use by people with diabetes.
1924 – Rand McNally publishes its first road atlas.
1927 – The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the most destructive river flood in U.S. history, begins.
1935 – Roerich Pact signed in Washington, D.C.
1936 – First day of the Arab revolt in Palestine.
1936 – Aer Lingus (Aer Loingeas) is founded by the Irish government as the national airline of the Republic of Ireland.
1940 – The Allies begin their attack on the Norwegian town of Narvik which is occupied by Nazi Germany.
1941 – In the Belfast Blitz, two-hundred bombers of the German Luftwaffe attack Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom killing one thousand people.
1942 – The George Cross is awarded to "to the island fortress of Malta – its people and defenders" by King George VI.
1945 – The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is liberated.
1947 – Jackie Robinson debuts for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking baseball's color line.
1952 – The maiden flight of the B-52 Stratofortress
1955 – McDonald's restaurant dates its founding to the opening of a franchised restaurant by Ray Kroc, in Des Plaines, Illinois
1957 – White Rock, British Columbia officially separates from Surrey, British Columbia and is incorporated as a new city.
1960 – At Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, Ella Baker leads a conference that results in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the principal organizations of the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
1969 – The EC-121 shootdown incident: North Korea shoots down a United States Navy aircraft over the Sea of Japan, killing all 31 on board.
1970 – During the Cambodian Civil War, massacres of the Vietnamese minority results in 800 bodies flowing down the Mekong River into South Vietnam.
1986 – The United States launches Operation El Dorado Canyon, its bombing raids against Libyan targets in response to a bombing in West Germany that killed two U.S. servicemen.
1989 – Hillsborough disaster: A human crush occurs at Hillsborough Stadium, home of Sheffield Wednesday, in the FA Cup Semi Final, resulting in the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans.
1989 – Upon Hu Yaobang's death, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 begin in the People's Republic of China.
2013 – Two bombs explode near the finish line at the Boston Marathon in Boston, Massachusetts, killing at least 3 people and injuring 183 others.
2013 – A wave of bombings across Iraq kills 56 people and injures approximately 300 others.


Boston Marathon bombings

Two pressure cooker bombs exploded during the 2013 Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, killing 3 people and injuring at least 183 others. The bombs were placed near the finish line, along Boylston Street. They exploded at 2:50 p.m. EDT (18:50 UTC), about 12 seconds apart. Doctors treating the injured have removed small metallic objects from them, including nails.

No suspects have been named, and there have been no arrests or claims of responsibility for the attack. President Barack Obama announced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating the bombings as an act of terrorism.


April 2013 Iraqi bombings

A wave of bombings across Iraq on 15 April 2013 killed at least 50 people, and injured close to 300 others. On 16 April, the violence continued with six further deaths reported. The attacks came just days before the provincial elections which will be held on 20 April.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 16

1457 BC – Likely date of the Battle of Megiddo between Thutmose III and a large Canaanite coalition under the King of Kadesh, the first battle to have been recorded in what is accepted as relatively reliable detail.
1178 BC – The calculated date of the Greek king Odysseus' return home from the Trojan War.
73 – Masada, a Jewish fortress, falls to the Romans after several months of siege, ending the Great Jewish Revolt.
1346 – Dušan the Mighty is proclaimed Emperor, with the Serbian Empire occupying much of the Balkans.
1520 – The Revolt of the Comuneros begins in Spain against the rule of Charles V.
1521 – Martin Luther's first appearance before the Diet of Worms to be examined by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the other estates of the empire.
1582 – Spanish conquistador Hernando de Lerma founds the settlement of Salta, Argentina.
1746 – The Battle of Culloden is fought between the French-supported Jacobites and the British Hanoverian forces commanded by William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, in Scotland. After the battle many highland traditions were banned and the Highlands of Scotland were cleared of inhabitants.
1780 – The University of Münster in Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany is founded.
1799 – Napoleonic Wars: The Battle of Mount Tabor – Napoleon drives Ottoman Turks across the River Jordan near Acre.
1818 – The United States Senate ratifies the Rush-Bagot Treaty, establishing the border with Canada.
1847 – The accidental shooting of a Māori by an English sailor results in the opening of the Wanganui Campaign of the New Zealand land wars.
1853 – The first passenger rail opens in India, from Bori Bunder, Bombay to Thane.
1858 – The Wernerian Natural History Society, a former Scottish learned society, is wound up.
1862 – American Civil War: The Battle at Lee's Mills in Virginia.
1862 – American Civil War: The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia, becomes law.
1863 – American Civil War: The Siege of Vicksburg – ships led by Union Admiral David Dixon Porter move through heavy Confederate artillery fire on approach to Vicksburg, Mississippi.
1881 – In Dodge City, Kansas, Bat Masterson fights his last gun battle.
1908 – Natural Bridges National Monument is established in Utah.
1912 – Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly an airplane across the English Channel.
1917 – Lenin returns to Petrograd from exile in Switzerland.
1919 – Gandhi organizes a day of "prayer and fasting" in response to the killing of Indian protesters in the Amritsar Massacre by the British.
1919 – Polish–Soviet War: The Polish army launches the Vilna offensive to capture Vilnius in modern Lithuania.
1922 – The Treaty of Rapallo, pursuant to which Germany and the Soviet Union re-establish diplomatic relations, is signed.
1925 – During the Communist St Nedelya Church assault in Sofia, 150 are killed and 500 are wounded.
1941 – World War II: The Italian convoy Duisburg, directed to Tunisia, is attacked and destroyed by British ships.
1941 – Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians throws the only Opening Day no-hitter in the history of Major League Baseball, beating the Chicago White Sox 1-0.
1944 – Allied forces started bombing of Belgrade, killing about 1,100 people. This bombing fell on the Orthodox Christian Easter.
1945 – The Red Army begins the final assault on German forces around Berlin, with nearly one million troops fighting in the Battle of the Seelow Heights.
1945 – The United States Army liberates Nazi Sonderlager (high security) prisoner-of-war camp Oflag IV-C (better known as Colditz).
1945 – More than 7,000 die when the German refugee ship Goya is sunk by a Soviet submarine torpedo.
1947 – Texas City Disaster: An explosion on board a freighter in port causes the city of Texas City, Texas, to catch fire, killing almost 600.
1947 – Bernard Baruch coins the term "Cold War" to describe the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union.
1953 – Queen Elizabeth II launches the Royal Yacht HMY Britannia.
1962 – Walter Cronkite takes over as the lead news anchor of the CBS Evening News, during which time he would become "the most trusted man in America".
1963 – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pens his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama for protesting against segregation.
1972 – Apollo program: The launch of Apollo 16 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
1990 – The "Doctor of Death", Jack Kevorkian, participates in his first assisted suicide.
1992 – The Katina P. runs aground off of Maputo, Mozambique and 60,000 tons of crude oil spill into the ocean.
2001 – India and Bangladesh begin a five-day border conflict, but are unable to resolve the disputes about their border.
2003 – The Treaty of Accession is signed in Athens admitting 10 new member states to the European Union.
2007 – Virginia Tech massacre: The deadliest spree shooting in modern American history. Seung-Hui Cho kills 32 and injures 23 before committing suicide.
2013 – A 7.8-magnitude earthquake strikes Sistan and Baluchestan Province, Iran, the strongest in the country in 40 years, killing at least 34 people.


Jallianwala Bagh massacre

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre (also known as the Amritsar massacre), took place in the Jallianwala Bagh public garden in the northern Indian city of Amritsar on 13 April 1919. The shooting that took place was ordered by Brigadier-General Reginald E.H. Dyer.

On Sunday, 13 April 1919, Dyer was convinced of a major insurrection and thus he banned all meetings. On hearing that a meeting of 15,000 to 20,000 people including women, children and the elderly had assembled at Jallianwala Bagh, Dyer went with fifty Gurkha riflemen to a raised bank and ordered them to shoot at the crowd. Dyer continued the firing for about ten minutes, until the ammunition supply was almost exhausted; Dyer stated that 1,650 rounds had been fired, a number which seems to have been derived by counting empty cartridge cases picked up by the troops. Official British Indian sources gave a figure of 379 identified dead, with approximately 1,100 wounded. The casualty number estimated by the Indian National Congress was more than 1,500, with approximately 1,000 dead.

Dyer was removed from duty and forced to retire by the House of Commons. He became a celebrated hero in Britain among most of the people connected to the British Raj. for example, the House of Lords, but unpopular in the House of Commons, that voted against Dyer twice.The massacre caused a reevaluation of the army's role, in which the new policy became "minimum force", and the army was retrained and developed suitable tactics for crowd control. Some historians consider the episode as a decisive step towards the end of British rule in India, although others believe that greater self-government was inevitable as a result of India's involvement in World War I.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 17

69 – After the First Battle of Bedriacum, Vitellius becomes Roman Emperor.
1080 – King of Denmark Harald III dies and is succeeded by Canute IV, who would later be the first Dane to be canonized.
1397 – Geoffrey Chaucer tells the Canterbury Tales for the first time at the court of Richard II. Chaucer scholars have also identified this date (in 1387) as the start of the book's pilgrimage to Canterbury.
1492 – Spain and Christopher Columbus sign the Capitulations of Santa Fe for his voyage to Asia to acquire spices.
1521 – Trial of Martin Luther over his teachings begins during the assembly of the Diet of Worms. Initially intimidated, he asks for time to reflect before answering and is given a stay of one day.
1524 – Giovanni da Verrazzano reaches New York harbor.
1555 – After 18 months of siege, Siena surrenders to the Florentine-Imperial army. The Republic of Siena is incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.
1797 – Sir Ralph Abercromby attacks San Juan, Puerto Rico in what would be one of the largest invasions of the Spanish territories in America.
1797 – Citizens of Verona, Italy, begin an eight-day rebellion against the French occupying forces, which will end unsuccessfully.
1864 – American Civil War: The Battle of Plymouth begins – Confederate forces attack Plymouth, North Carolina.
1895 – The Treaty of Shimonoseki between China and Japan is signed. This marks the end of the First Sino-Japanese War, and the defeated Qing Empire is forced to renounce its claims on Korea and to concede the southern portion of the Fengtien province, Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands to Japan.
1897 – The Aurora, Texas UFO incident
1905 – The Supreme Court of the United States decides Lochner v. New York which holds that the "right to free contract" is implicit in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
1907 – The Ellis Island immigration center processes 11,747 people, more than on any other day.
1912 – Russian troops open fire on striking goldfield workers in northeast Siberia, killing at least 150.
1941 – World War II: The Kingdom of Yugoslavia surrenders to Germany.
1942 – French prisoner of war General Henri Giraud escapes from his castle prison in Festung Königstein.
1944 – Forces of the Communist-controlled Greek People's Liberation Army attack the smaller National and Social Liberation resistance group, which surrenders. Its leader Dimitrios Psarros is murdered.
1945 – Brazilian forces liberate the town of Montese, Italy, from German Nazi forces.
1946 – Syria obtains its Independence from the French occupation.
1949 – At midnight 26 Irish counties officially leave the British Commonwealth. A 21-gun salute on O'Connell Bridge, Dublin, ushers in the Republic of Ireland.
1951 – The Peak District becomes the United Kingdom's first National Park.
1961 – Bay of Pigs Invasion: A group of CIA financed and trained Cuban exiles lands at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro.
1964 – Jerrie Mock becomes the first woman to circumnavigate the world by air.
1964 – Ford Mustang is introduced to the North American market.
1969 – Sirhan Sirhan is convicted of assassinating Robert F. Kennedy.
1969 – Czechoslovakian Communist Party chairman Alexander Dubček is deposed.
1970 – Apollo program: The ill-fated Apollo 13 spacecraft returns to Earth safely.
1971 – The People's Republic of Bangladesh forms, under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman at Mujibnagor.
1973 – George Lucas begins writing the treatment for The Star Wars.
1975 – The Cambodian Civil War ends. The Khmer Rouge captures the capital Phnom Penh and Cambodian government forces surrender.
1978 – Mir Akbar Khyber is assassinated, provoking a communist coup d'état in Afghanistan.
1982 – Patriation of the Canadian constitution in Ottawa by Proclamation of Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada.
1984 – Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher is killed by gunfire from the Libyan People's Bureau (Embassy) in London during a small demonstration outside the embassy. Ten others are wounded. The events lead to an 11-day siege of the building.
1986 – The Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly ends.
1986 – Nezar Hindawi's attempt to detonate a bomb aboard an El Al flight from London to Tel Aviv is thwarted.
2006 – Sami Hammad, a Palestinian suicide bomber, detonates an explosive device in Tel Aviv, killing 11 people and injuring 70.
2012 – Ilias Ali, organizing secretary of Bangladesh Nationalist Party and a former MP, disappears from Dhaka along with his chauffeur, allegedly abducted by government forces.


Aurora, Texas, UFO incident

The Aurora, Texas, UFO incident is a UFO incident that reportedly occurred on April 17, 1897, in Aurora, Texas, a small town in the northwest corner of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. The incident (similar to the more famous Roswell UFO incident 50 years later) reportedly resulted in a fatality from the crash. The alleged alien body is reportedly buried in an unmarked grave at the local cemetery.



Bay of Pigs Invasion

The Bay of Pigs Invasion, known in Hispanic America as La Batalla de Girón, was an unsuccessful military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the paramilitary group Brigade 2506 on 17 April 1961. A counter-revolutionary military trained and funded by the United States government's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Brigade 2506 fronted the armed wing of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (DRF) and intended to overthrow the revolutionary leftist government of President Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado. Launched from Guatemala, the invading force was defeated by the Cuban armed forces, under the command of Prime Minister Fidel Castro, within three days.

The Cuban Revolution of 1953 to 1959 had seen President Fulgencio Batista, a right-wing ally of the U.S., ousted. He was replaced by a new leftist administration dominated by Castro, which had severed the country's formerly strong links with the U.S. by expropriating their economic assets and developing links with the Soviet Union, with whom the U.S. was then embroiled in the Cold War. The U.S. government of President Dwight D. Eisenhower was concerned at the direction which Castro's government was taking, and in March 1960, Eisenhower allocated $13 million to the CIA in order to plan Castro's overthrow. The CIA proceeded to organize the operation with the aid of the Mafia and various Cuban counter-revolutionary forces, training Brigade 2506 in Mexico. Following his victory in the 1960 United States presidential election, John F. Kennedy was informed of the invasion plan and gave his assent to it.

1,400 paramilitaries, divided into five infantry battalions and one paratrooper battalion, had assembled in Guatemala before setting out for Cuba by boat on 13 April. On 15 April, eight CIA-supplied B-26 bombers attacked Cuban air fields before returning to the U.S., and on the night of 16 April, the main invasion landed at a beach named Playa Girón in the Bay of Pigs, initially overwhelming a local revolutionary militia. The Cuban Army's counter-offensive was led by Captain José Ramón Fernández, before Castro decided to take personal control of the operation. On 20 April, the invaders finally surrendered, with the majority of troops being publicly interrogated and then sent back to the U.S.

The failed invasion strengthened the position of Castro's administration, who proceeded to openly proclaim their intention to adopt socialism and strengthen ties with the Soviet Union, leading to the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The invasion was a major embarrassment for U.S. foreign policy, with Kennedy ordering a number of internal investigations. Across much of Latin America, it was celebrated as evidence of the fallibility of U.S. imperialism.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 18

1025 – Bolesław Chrobry is crowned in Gniezno, becoming the first King of Poland.
1506 – The cornerstone of the current St. Peter's Basilica is laid.
1518 – Bona Sforza is crowned as queen consort of Poland.
1521 – Trial of Martin Luther begins its second day during the assembly of the Diet of Worms. He refuses to recant his teachings despite the risk of excommunication.
1689 – Bostonians rise up in rebellion against Sir Edmund Andros.
1738 – Real Academia de la Historia ("Royal Academy of History") is founded in Madrid.
1775 – American Revolution: The British advancement by sea begins; Paul Revere and other riders warn the countryside of the troop movements.
1797 – The Battle of Neuwied – French victory against the Austrians.
1831 – The University of Alabama is founded.
1848 – American victory at the battle of Cerro Gordo opens the way for invasion of Mexico.
1857 – "The Spirits Book" by Allan Kardec is published, marking the birth of Spiritualism in France.
1864 – Battle of Dybbøl: A Prussian-Austrian army defeats Denmark and gains control of Schleswig. Denmark surrenders the province in the following peace settlement.
1880 – An F4 tornado strikes Marshfield, Missouri, killing 99 people and injuring 100.
1881 – Billy the Kid escapes from the Lincoln County jail in Mesilla, New Mexico.
1897 – The Greco-Turkish War is declared between Greece and the Ottoman Empire.
1899 – The St. Andrew's Ambulance Association is granted a Royal Charter by Queen Victoria.
1902 – Quetzaltenango, the second largest city of Guatemala, is destroyed by an earthquake.
1906 – An earthquake and fire destroy much of San Francisco, California.
1909 – Joan of Arc is beatified in Rome.
1912 – The Cunard liner RMS Carpathia brings 705 survivors from the RMS Titanic to New York City.
1915 – French pilot Roland Garros is shot down and glides to a landing on the German side of the lines during World War I.
1923 – Yankee Stadium, "The House that Ruth Built", opens.
1924 – Simon & Schuster publishes the first crossword puzzle book.
1936 – The first Champions Day is celebrated in Detroit, Michigan.
1942 – World War II: The Doolittle Raid on Japan. Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe and Nagoya are bombed.
1942 – Pierre Laval becomes Prime Minister of Vichy France.
1943 – World War II: Operation Vengeance, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is killed when his aircraft is shot down by U.S. fighters over Bougainville Island.
1945 – Over 1,000 bombers attack the small island of Heligoland, Germany.
1946 – The International Court of Justice holds its inaugural meeting in The Hague, Netherlands.
1949 – The keel for the aircraft carrier USS United States is laid down at Newport News Drydock and Shipbuilding. However, construction is canceled five days later, resulting in the Revolt of the Admirals.
1954 – Gamal Abdal Nasser seizes power in Egypt.
1955 – 29 nations meet at Bandung, Indonesia, for the first Asian-African Conference.
1958 – A United States federal court rules that poet Ezra Pound be released from an insane asylum.
1961 – The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, a cornerstone of modern international relations, is adopted.
1961 – CONCP is founded in Casablanca as a united front of African movements opposing Portuguese colonial rule.
1974 – The Prime Minister of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto inaugurates Lahore's dry port.
1980 – The Republic of Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) comes into being, with Canaan Banana as the country's first President. The Zimbabwe Dollar replaces the Rhodesian Dollar as the official currency.
1981 – The longest professional baseball game is begun in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The game is suspended at 4:00 the next morning and finally completed on June 23.
1983 – A suicide bomber destroys the United States embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63 people.
1988 – The United States launches Operation Praying Mantis against Iranian naval forces in the largest naval battle since World War II.
1992 – General Abdul Rashid Dostum revolts against President Mohammad Najibullah of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and allies with Ahmed Shah Massoud to capture Kabul.
1996 – In Lebanon, at least 106 civilians are killed when the Israel Defense Forces shell the United Nations compound at Quana where more than 800 civilians had taken refuge.
2007 – The Supreme Court of the United States upholds the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in a 5-4 decision.
2007 – A series of bombings, two of them being suicides, occur in Baghdad, killing 198 and injuring 251.


1689 Boston revolt

The 1689 Boston revolt was a popular uprising on April 18, 1689, against the rule of Sir Edmund Andros, the governor of the Dominion of New England. A well-organized "mob" of provincial militia and citizens formed in the city and arrested dominion officials. Members of the Church of England, believed by Puritans to sympathize with the administration of the dominion, were also taken into custody by the rebels. Neither faction sustained casualties during the revolt. Leaders of the former Massachusetts Bay Colony then reclaimed control of the government. In other colonies, members of governments displaced by the dominion were returned to power.

Andros, commissioned governor of New England in 1686, had earned the enmity of the local populace by enforcing the restrictive Navigation Acts, denying the validity of existing land titles, restricting town meetings, and appointing unpopular regular officers to lead colonial militia, among other actions. Furthermore, he had infuriated Puritans in Boston by promoting the Church of England, which was disliked by many Nonconformist New England colonists.


1996 shelling of Qana

The 1996 shelling of Qana or the First Qana massacre, took place on April 18, 1996 near Qana, a village in Southern Lebanon, when artillery shells fired by the Israeli Defence Force hit a United Nations compound. Of 800 Lebanese civilians who had taken refuge in the compound, 106 were killed and around 116 injured. Four Fijian United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon soldiers were also seriously injured.

The attack occurred amid heavy fighting between the Israeli Defense Forces and Hezbollah during "Operation Grapes of Wrath". A United Nations investigation later stated it was unlikely that the Israeli shelling was a technical or procedural error.


18 April 2007 Baghdad bombings

The 18 April 2007 Baghdad bombings were a series of attacks that occurred when five car bombs exploded across Baghdad, the capital city of Iraq, on 18 April 2007, killing nearly 200 people.

The attacks targeted mainly Shia locations and civilians. The Sadriya market had already been struck by a massive truck bombing on 3 February 2007 and was in the process of being rebuilt when the attack took place. The bombings were reminiscent of the level of violence before Operation Law and Order was implemented to secure the Iraqi capital in February 2007.

The attacks came as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said that Iraqi forces would assume control of the country's security by the end of the year, and they also came as officials from more than 60 countries attended a UN conference in Geneva on the plight of Iraqi refugees.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 19

65 – The freedman Milichus betrayed Piso’s plot to kill the Emperor Nero and all the conspirators were arrested.
531 – Battle of Callinicum: A Byzantine army under Belisarius is defeated by the Persian at Ar-Raqqah (northern Syria).
1012 – Martyrdom of Ælfheah in Greenwich, London.
1529 – Beginning of the Protestant Reformation: The Second Diet of Speyer bans Lutheranism; a group of rulers (German: Fürst) and independent cities (German: Reichsstadt) protests the reinstatement of the Edict of Worms.
1539 – Charles V and Protestants signs Treaty of Frankfurt.
1677 – The French army captures the town of Cambrai held by Spanish troops.
1713 – With no living male heirs, Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor, issues the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 to ensure that Habsburg lands and the Austrian throne would be inherited by his daughter, Maria Theresa of Austria (not actually born until 1717).
1770 – Captain James Cook sights the eastern coast of what is now Australia.
1770 – Marie Antoinette marries Louis XVI in a proxy wedding.
1775 – American Revolutionary War: The war begins with an American victory in Concord during the battles of Lexington and Concord.
1782 – John Adams secures the Dutch Republic's recognition of the United States as an independent government. The house which he had purchased in The Hague, Netherlands becomes the first American embassy.
1809 – An Austrian corps is defeated by the forces of the Duchy of Warsaw in the Battle of Raszyn, part of the struggles of the Fifth Coalition. On the same day the Austrian main army is defeated by a First French Empire Corps led by Louis-Nicolas Davout at the Battle of Teugen-Hausen in Bavaria, part of a four day campaign that ended in a French victory.
1810 – Venezuela achieves home rule: Vicente Emparan, Governor of the Captaincy General is removed by the people of Caracas and a junta is installed.
1839 – The Treaty of London establishes Belgium as a kingdom.
1855 – Visit of Napoleon III to Guildhall, London
1861 – American Civil War: Baltimore riot of 1861: a pro-Secession mob in Baltimore, Maryland, attacks United States Army troops marching through the city.
1892 – Charles Duryea claims to have driven the first automobile in the United States, in Springfield, Massachusetts.
1903 – The Kishinev pogrom in Kishinev (Bessarabia) begins, forcing tens of thousands of Jews to later seek refuge in Israel and the Western world.
1919 – Leslie Irvin of the United States makes the first successful voluntary free-fall parachute jump using a new kind of self-contained parachute.
1927 – Mae West is sentenced to 10 days in jail for obscenity for her play Sex.
1928 – The 125th and final fascicle of the Oxford English Dictionary is published.
1942 – World War II: In Poland, the Majdan-Tatarski ghetto is established, situated between the Lublin Ghetto and a Majdanek subcamp.
1943 – World War II: In Poland, German troops enter the Warsaw ghetto to round up the remaining Jews, beginning the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
1945 – Diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Guatemala are established.
1948 – Burma joins the United Nations.
1950 – Argentina becomes a signatory to the Buenos Aires copyright treaty.
1951 – General Douglas MacArthur retires from the military.
1954 – The Constituent Assembly of Pakistan recognises Urdu and Bengali as the national languages of Pakistan.
1956 – Actress Grace Kelly marries Prince Rainier of Monaco.
1960 – Students in South Korea hold a nationwide pro-democracy protest against president Syngman Rhee, eventually forcing him to resign.
1971 – Sierra Leone becomes a republic, and Siaka Stevens the president.
1971 – Vietnam War: Vietnam Veterans Against the War begin a five-day demonstration in Washington, D.C..
1971 – Launch of Salyut 1, the first space station.
1971 – Charles Manson is sentenced to death for conspiracy to commit the Tate/LaBianca murders.
1973 – The Portuguese Socialist Party is founded in the German town of Bad Münstereifel.
1975 – India's first satellite, Aryabhata, is launched.
1984 – Advance Australia Fair is proclaimed as Australia's national anthem, and green and gold as the national colours.
1985 – FBI siege on the compound of The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSAL) in Arkansas.
1985 – U.S.S.R performs nuclear test at Eastern Kazakhstan/Semipalatinsk.
1987 – The Simpsons premieres as a short cartoon on The Tracey Ullman Show.
1989 – A gun turret explodes on the USS Iowa, killing 47 sailors.
1993 – The 51 day siege of the Branch Davidian building outside Waco, Texas, USA, ends when a fire breaks out. Eighty-one people die.
1993 – South Dakota governor George Mickelson and seven others are killed when a state-owned aircraft crashes in Iowa.
1995 – Oklahoma City bombing: The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, is bombed, killing 168. That same day convicted murderer Richard Wayne Snell, who had ties to one of the bombers, Timothy McVeigh, is executed in Arkansas.
1997 – The Red River Flood of 1997 overwhelms the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota. Fire breaks out and spreads in downtown Grand Forks, but high water levels hamper efforts to reach the fire, leading to the destruction of 11 buildings.
1999 – The German Bundestag returns to Berlin, the first German parliamentary body to meet there since the Reichstag was dissolved in 1933.
2011 – Fidel Castro resigns from the Communist Party of Cuba's central committee after 45 years of holding the title.
2013 – One of the Boston Marathon Bombings bombers/suspects Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested after hiding in a boat inside a backyard in Watertown, Massachusetts. Suspect was taken to Beth Israel-Deaconness Hospital in Boston. His brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the other suspect in the bombing, had been involved in a shootout with police earlier in the day, and had been pronounced dead at the same hospital

[Duke of Buckingham]

Terra Australis

In 1766, the Royal Society engaged Cook to travel to the Pacific Ocean to observe and record the transit of Venus across the Sun. Cook, at the age of 39, was promoted to lieutenant and named as commander of the expedition. The expedition sailed from England on 26 August 1768, rounded Cape Horn and continued westward across the Pacific to arrive at Tahiti on 13 April 1769, where the observations of the Venus Transit were made. However, the result of the observations was not as conclusive or accurate as had been hoped. Once the observations were completed, Cook opened the sealed orders which were additional instructions from the Admiralty for the second part of his voyage: to search the south Pacific for signs of the postulated rich southern continent of Terra Australis. Cook then sailed to New Zealand and mapped the complete coastline, making only some minor errors. He then voyaged west, reaching the south-eastern coast of Australia on 19 April 1770, and in doing so his expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered its eastern coastline.

On 23 April he made his first recorded direct observation of indigenous Australians at Brush Island near Bawley Point, noting in his journal: "…and were so near the Shore as to distinguish several people upon the Sea beach they appear'd to be of a very dark or black Colour but whether this was the real colour of their skins or the C[l]othes they might have on I know not." On 29 April Cook and crew made their first landfall on the mainland of the continent at a place now known as the Kurnell Peninsula. Cook originally christened the area as "Stingray Bay", but he later crossed it out and named it Botany Bay after the unique specimens retrieved by the botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander. It is here that James Cook made first contact with an Aboriginal tribe known as the Gweagal.

After his departure from Botany Bay he continued northwards, and a mishap occurred, on 11 June, when the Endeavour ran aground on a shoal of the Great Barrier Reef, and then "nursed into a river mouth on 18 June 1770". The ship was badly damaged and his voyage was delayed almost seven weeks while repairs were carried out on the beach (near the docks of modern Cooktown, Queensland, at the mouth of the Endeavour River). Once repairs were complete the voyage continued, sailing through Torres Strait and on 22 August he landed on Possession Island, where he claimed the entire coastline he had just explored as British territory. He returned to England via Batavia (modern Jakarta, Indonesia, where many in his crew succumbed to malaria), the Cape of Good Hope and the island of Saint Helena, arriving on 12 July 1771.


Kishinev pogrom

The Kishinev pogrom was an anti-Jewish riot that took place in Kishinev (Chişinău), then the capital of the Bessarabia province of the Russian Empire (now the capital of Moldova) on April 6-7, 1903.

The Kishinev pogrom started on April 19th (April 6th O.S.) after the Christian population of the town got out of church on Easter Sunday. It spanned three days of rioting against the Jews. Forty-seven (some put the figure at 49) Jews were killed, 92 severely wounded, 500 slightly wounded and over 700 houses and many businesses looted and destroyed. The Times published a forged dispatch by Vyacheslav von Plehve, the Minister of Interior, to the governor of Bessarabia, which supposedly gave orders not to stop the rioters, but, in any case, no attempt was made by the police or military to intervene to stop the riots until the third day. This non-intervention is an argument in support of the opinion that the pogrom was sponsored or, at least, tolerated by the state.


Sex (play)

Sex is a 1926 play, written by, and starring, Mae West. There were 375 performances before the New York Police Department raided West and her company in February 1927. They were charged with obscenity, despite the fact that 325,000 people had watched it, including members of the police department and their wives, judges of the criminal courts, and seven members of the district attorney’s staff. West was sentenced to 10 days in a workhouse on Roosevelt Island (known then as "Welfare Island") and fined $500. The resulting publicity increased her national renown.


Salyut 1

Salyut 1 (DOS-1) (Russian: Салют-1; English translation: Salute 1) was the first space station of any kind, launched by the Soviet Union on April 19, 1971. More stations followed in the Salyut programme, and heritage of that space station program is still in use on the ISS.

It was launched unmanned using a Proton-K rocket. The first crew launched later in the Soyuz 10 mission, but they ran into troubles while docking and were unable to enter the station; the Soyuz 10 mission was aborted and the crew returned safely to Earth. Its second crew launched in Soyuz 11 and remained on board for 23 days. This was the first time in the history of spaceflight that a space station had been manned, and a new record in time spent in space. This success was however overshadowed when the crew was killed during reentry, as a pressure-equalization valve in the Soyuz 11 reentry capsule had opened prematurely, causing the crew to suffocate. After this accident, missions were suspended while the Soyuz spacecraft was redesigned. The station was intentionally destroyed by de-orbiting it after six months in orbit, because it ran out of fuel before a redesigned Soyuz spacecraft could be launched to it.


Oklahoma City bombing

The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. It would remain the most destructive act of terrorism on American soil until the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Oklahoma blast claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and injured more than 680 people. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings. The bomb was estimated to have caused at least $652 million worth of damage. Extensive rescue efforts were undertaken by local, state, federal, and worldwide agencies in the wake of the bombing, and substantial donations were received from across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) activated eleven of its Urban Search and Rescue Task Forces, consisting of 665 rescue workers who assisted in rescue and recovery operations.

Within 90 minutes of the explosion, Timothy McVeigh was stopped by Oklahoma State Trooper Charlie Hanger for driving without a license plate and arrested for unlawfully carrying a weapon. Forensic evidence quickly linked McVeigh and Terry Nichols to the attack; Nichols was arrested, and within days both were charged. Michael and Lori Fortier were later identified as accomplices. McVeigh, an American militia movement sympathizer who was a Gulf War veteran, had detonated an explosive-filled Ryder rental truck parked in front of the building. McVeigh's co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, had assisted in the bomb preparation. Motivated by his hatred of the federal government and angered by what he perceived as its mishandling of the Waco Siege (1993) and the Ruby Ridge incident (1992), McVeigh timed his attack to coincide with the second anniversary of the deadly fire that ended the siege at Waco.

The official investigation, known as "OKBOMB", was the largest criminal investigation case in American history; FBI agents conducted 28,000 interviews, amassing 3.5 short tons (3.2 t) of evidence, and collected nearly one billion pieces of information. The bombers were tried and convicted in 1997. McVeigh was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001, and Nichols was sentenced to life in prison. Michael and Lori Fortier testified against McVeigh and Nichols; Michael was sentenced to 12 years in prison for failing to warn the U.S. government, and Lori received immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony. As with other large-scale terrorist attacks, conspiracy theories dispute the official claims and allege the involvement of additional perpetrators.

As a result of the bombing, the U.S. government passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which tightened the standards for habeas corpus in the United States, as well as legislation designed to increase the protection around federal buildings to deter future terrorist attacks. On April 19, 2000, the Oklahoma City National Memorial was dedicated on the site of the Murrah Federal Building, commemorating the victims of the bombing. Annual remembrance services are held at the same time of day as the original explosion occurred.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 20

1303 – The University of Rome La Sapienza is instituted by Pope Boniface VIII.
1453 – The [[last naval battle in Byzantine]] history occurs, as three Genoese galleys escorting a Byzantine transport fight their way through the huge Ottoman blockade fleet and into the Golden Horn.
1534 – Jacques Cartier begins the voyage during which he discovers Canada and Labrador.
1535 – The Sun dog phenomenon observed over Stockholm and depicted in the famous painting "Vädersolstavlan".
1653 – Oliver Cromwell dissolves the Rump Parliament.
1657 – Admiral Robert Blake destroys a Spanish silver fleet under heavy fire at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
1657 – Freedom of religion is granted to the Jews of New Amsterdam (later New York City).
1689 – The former King James II of England, now deposed, lays siege to Derry.
1752 – Start of Konbaung-Hanthawaddy War, a new phase in Burmese Civil War (1740–1757)
1770 – The Georgian king Erekle II, abandoned by his Russian ally Count Totleben, wins a victory over Ottoman forces at Aspindza.
1775 – American Revolutionary War: the Siege of Boston begins, following the battles at Lexington and Concord.
1792 – France declares war against the "King of Hungary and Bohemia", the beginning of French Revolutionary Wars.
1809 – Two Austrian army corps in Bavaria are defeated by a First French Empire army led by Napoleon I of France at the Battle of Abensberg on the second day of a four day campaign that ended in a French victory.
1810 – The Governor of Caracas declares independence from Spain.
1818 – The case of Ashford v Thornton ends, with Abraham Thornton allowed to go free rather than face a retrial for murder, after his demand for trial by battle is upheld.
1828 – René Caillié becomes the first non-Muslim to enter Timbouctou.
1836 – U.S. Congress passes an act creating the Wisconsin Territory.
1861 – American Civil War: Robert E. Lee resigns his commission in the United States Army in order to command the forces of the state of Virginia.
1862 – Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard complete the experiment falsifying the theory of spontaneous generation.
1865 – Astronomer Pietro Angelo Secchi demonstrates the Secchi disk, which measures water clarity, aboard Pope Pius IX's yacht, the L’Immaculata Concezion.
1871 – The Civil Rights Act of 1871 becomes law.
1876 – The April Uprising, a key point in modern Bulgarian history, leading to the Russo-Turkish War and the liberation of Bulgaria from domination as an independent part of the Ottoman Empire.
1884 – Pope Leo XIII publishes the encyclical Humanum Genus.
1902 – Pierre and Marie Curie refine radium chloride.
1908 – Opening day of competition in the New South Wales Rugby League.
1912 – Opening day for baseball's Tiger Stadium in Detroit, Michigan, and Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts.
1914 – 19 men, women, and children die in the Ludlow Massacre during a Colorado coal-miner's strike.
1916 – The Chicago Cubs play their first game at Weeghman Park (currently Wrigley Field), defeating the Cincinnati Reds 7-6 in 11 innings.
1918 – Manfred von Richthofen, aka The Red Baron, shoots down his 79th and 80th victims, his final victories before his death the following day.
1922 – The Soviet government creates South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast within Georgian SSR.
1926 – Western Electric and Warner Bros. announce Vitaphone, a process to add sound to film.
1939 – Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday is celebrated as a national holiday in Nazi Germany.
1939 – Billie Holiday records the first Civil Rights song "Strange Fruit".
1945 – World War II: US troops capture Leipzig, Germany, only to later cede the city to the Soviet Union.
1945 – World War II: Fuehrerbunker: Adolf Hitler makes his last trip to the surface to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth.
1946 – The League of Nations officially dissolves, giving most of its power to the United Nations.
1951– Dan Gavriliu performs the first surgical replacement of a human organ.
1961 – Failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of US-backed Cuban exiles against Cuba.
1964 – BBC Two launches with a power cut because of the fire at Battersea Power Station.
1968 – English politician Enoch Powell makes his controversial Rivers of Blood speech.
1972 – Apollo 16, commanded by John Young, lands on the moon.
1978 – Korean Air Flight 902 is shot down by the Soviet Union.
1980 – Climax of Berber Spring in Algeria as hundreds of Berber political activists are arrested.
1984 – The Good Friday Massacre, an extremely violent ice hockey playoff game, is played in Montreal, Canada.
1985 – The ATF raids The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord compound in northern Arkansas.
1986 – Pianist Vladimir Horowitz performs in his native Russia for the first time in 61 years.
1998 – German terrorist group the Red Army Faction announces their dissolution after 28 years.
1999 – Columbine High School massacre: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kill 13 people and injure 24 others before committing suicide at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado.
2007 – Johnson Space Center Shooting: A man with a handgun barricades himself in NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas before killing a male hostage and himself.
2008 – Danica Patrick wins the Indy Japan 300 becoming the first female driver in history to win an Indy car race.
2010 – The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and beginning an oil spill that would last six months.


Radium

Radium is a chemical element with symbol Ra and atomic number 88. Radium is an almost pure-white alkaline earth metal, but it readily oxidizes on exposure to air, becoming black in color. All isotopes of radium are highly radioactive, with the most stable isotope being radium-226, which has a half-life of 1601 years and decays into radon gas. Because of such instability, radium is luminescent, glowing a faint blue.

In nature, radium is found in uranium ores in trace amounts as small as a seventh of a gram per ton of uraninite. Radium is not necessary for living organisms, and adverse health effects are likely when it is incorporated into biochemical processes because of its radioactivity and chemical reactivity.


Führerbunker

On 20 April, his 56th birthday, Hitler made his last trip to the surface and in the ruined garden of the Reich Chancellery awarded Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth. That afternoon, Berlin was bombarded by Soviet artillery for the first time.


Apollo 16

Apollo 16 was the tenth manned mission in the United States Apollo space program, the fifth and penultimate to land on the Moon and the first to land in the lunar highlands. The second of the so-called J-missions, it was crewed by Commander John Young, Lunar Module Pilot Charles Duke and Command Module Pilot Ken Mattingly. Launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:54 PM EST on April 16, 1972, the mission lasted 11 days, 1 hour, and 51 minutes, and concluded at 2:45 PM EST on April 27.

John Young and Charles Duke spent 71 hours—just under three days—on the lunar surface, during which they conducted three extra-vehicular activities or moonwalks, totaling 20 hours and 14 minutes. The pair drove the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), the second produced and used on the Moon, 26.7 kilometres (16.6 mi). On the surface, Young and Duke collected 95.8 kilograms (211 lb) of lunar samples for return to Earth, while Command Module Pilot Ken Mattingly orbited in the Command/Service Module above to perform observations. Mattingly spent 126 hours and 64 revolutions in lunar orbit. After Young and Duke rejoined Mattingly in lunar orbit, the crew released a sub-satellite from the Service Module. During the return trip to Earth, Mattingly performed a one-hour spacewalk to retrieve several film cassettes from the exterior of the Service Module.

Apollo 16's landing spot in the highlands was chosen to allow the astronauts to gather geologically older lunar material than the samples obtained in the first four landings, which were in or near lunar maria. Samples from the Descartes Formation and the Cayley Formation disproved a hypothesis that the formations were volcanic in origin.


Deepwater Horizon explosion

The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion refers to the April 20, 2010 explosion and subsequent fire on the Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit (MODU), which was owned and operated by Transocean and drilling for BP in the Macondo Prospect oil field about 40 miles (60 km) southeast of the Louisiana coast. The explosion killed 11 workers and injured 16 others. The explosion caused the Deepwater Horizon to burn and sink, resulting in a massive offshore oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, considered the largest accidental marine oil spill in the world, and the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 21

753 BC – Romulus and Remus founded Rome (traditional date).
43 BC – Battle of Mutina: Mark Antony is again defeated in battle by Aulus Hirtius, who is killed. Antony fails to capture Mutina and Decimus Brutus is murdered shortly after.
571 – Prophet Muhammad was born in Makkah.
900 – The Laguna Copperplate Inscription: the Honourable Namwaran and his children, Lady Angkatan and Bukah, are granted pardon from all their debts by the Commander in chief of Tundun, as represented by the Honourable Jayadewa, Lord Minister of Pailah. Luzon, Philippines.
1506 – The three-day Lisbon Massacre comes to an end with the slaughter of over 1,900.
1509 – Henry VIII ascends the throne of England on the death of his father, Henry VII.
1526 – The last ruler of the Lodi Dynasty, Ibrahim Lodi is defeated and killed by Babur in the First Battle of Panipat.
1782 – The city of Rattanakosin, now known internationally as Bangkok, is founded on the eastern bank of the Chao Phraya River by King Buddha Yodfa Chulaloke.
1792 – Tiradentes, a revolutionary leading a movement for Brazil's independence, is hanged, drawn and quartered.
1809 – Two Austrian army corps are driven from Landshut by a First French Empire army led by Napoleon I of France as two French corps to the north hold off the main Austrian army on the first day of the Battle of Eckmühl.
1836 – Texas Revolution: The Battle of San Jacinto – Republic of Texas forces under Sam Houston defeat troops under Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna.
1863 – Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith, declares his mission as "He whom God shall make manifest".
1894 – Norway formally adopts the Krag-Jørgensen rifle as the main arm of its armed forces, a weapon that would remain in service for almost 50 years.
1914 – Ypiranga incident: A German arms shipment to Mexico is intercepted by the U.S. Navy near Veracruz.
1918 – World War I: German fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, known as "The Red Baron", is shot down and killed over Vaux-sur-Somme in France.
1922 – The first Aggie Muster is held as a remembrance for fellow Texas A&M graduates who had died in the previous year.
1934 – The "Surgeon's Photograph", the most famous photo allegedly showing the Loch Ness Monster, is published in the Daily Mail (in 1999, it is revealed to be a hoax).
1941 – Emmanouil Tsouderos becomes the 132nd Prime Minister of Greece.
1942 – World War II: The most famous (and first international) Aggie Muster is held on the Philippine island of Corregidor, by Brigadier General George F. Moore (with 25 fellow Texas A&M graduates who are under his command), while 1.8 million pounds of shells pounded the island over a 5 hour attack.
1945 – World War II: Soviet Union forces south of Berlin at Zossen attack the German High Command headquarters.
1952 – Secretary's Day (now Administrative Professionals' Day) is first celebrated.
1960 – Brasília, Brazil's capital, is officially inaugurated. At 9:30 am the Three Powers of the Republic are simultaneously transferred from the old capital, Rio de Janeiro.
1962 – The Seattle World's Fair (Century 21 Exposition) opens. It is the first World's Fair in the United States since World War II.
1963 – The Universal House of Justice of the Bahá'í Faith is elected for the first time.
1964 – A Transit-5bn satellite fails to reach orbit after launch; as it re-enters the atmosphere, 2.1 pounds (0.95 kg) of radioactive plutonium in its SNAP RTG power source is widely dispersed.
1965 – The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair opens for its second and final season.
1966 – Rastafari movement: Haile Selassie of Ethiopia visits Jamaica, an event now celebrated as Grounation Day.
1967 – Greek military junta of 1967–1974: A few days before the general election in Greece, Colonel George Papadopoulos leads a coup d'état, establishing a military regime that lasts for seven years.
1970 – The Hutt River Province Principality secedes from Australia.
1975 – Vietnam War: President of South Vietnam Nguyen Van Thieu flees Saigon, as Xuan Loc, the last South Vietnamese outpost blocking a direct North Vietnamese assault on Saigon, falls.
1982 – Baseball: Rollie Fingers of the Milwaukee Brewers becomes the first pitcher to record 300 saves.
1987 – The Tamil Tigers are blamed for a car bomb that explodes in the Sri Lankan city of Colombo, killing 106 people.
1989 – Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989: In Beijing, around 100,000 students gather in Tiananmen Square to commemorate Chinese reform leader Hu Yaobang.
1992 – The first discoveries of extrasolar planets are announced by astronomers Alexander Wolszczan and Dale Frail .They discovered two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12
1993 – The Supreme Court in La Paz, Bolivia, sentences former dictator Luis Garcia Meza to 30 years in jail without parole for murder, theft, fraud and violating the constitution.
2004 – Five suicide car bombers target police stations in and around Basra, killing 74 people and wounding 160.


Tiradentes

Joaquim José da Silva Xavier ([ʒwaˈkĩ ʒuˈzɛ dɐ ˈsiwvɐ ʃɐviˈɛʁ]), known as Tiradentes (August 16, 1746–-April 21, 1792, IPA: [tʃiɾɐˈdẽtʃis]), was a leading member of the Brazilian revolutionary movement known as the Inconfidência Mineira whose aim was full independence from the Portuguese colonial power and to create a Brazilian republic. When the plan was discovered, Tiradentes was arrested, tried and publicly hanged. Since the 19th century he has been considered a national hero of Brazil and patron of the Polícia Militar de Minas Gerais (Minas Gerais Military Police).


Manfred von Richthofen

Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen (2 May 1892 – 21 April 1918), also widely known as the Red Baron, was a German fighter pilot with the Imperial German Army Air Service (Luftstreitkräfte) during World War I. He is considered the top ace of that war, being officially credited with 80 air combat victories.

Originally a cavalryman, Richthofen transferred to the Air Service in 1915, becoming one of the first members of Jasta 2 in 1916. He quickly distinguished himself as a fighter pilot, and during 1917 became leader of Jasta 11 and then the larger unit Jagdgeschwader 1 (better known as the "Flying Circus"). By 1918, he was regarded as a national hero in Germany, and was very well known by the other side.

Richthofen was shot down and killed near Amiens on 21 April 1918. There has been considerable discussion and debate regarding aspects of his career, especially the circumstances of his death. He remains perhaps the most widely known fighter pilot of all time, and has been the subject of many books, films and other media.


Extrasolar planet

The first published discovery to receive subsequent confirmation was made in 1988 by the Canadian astronomers Bruce Campbell, G. A. H. Walker, and Stephenson Yang of University of Victoria and University of British Columbia. Although they were cautious about claiming a planetary detection, their radial-velocity observations suggested that a planet orbits the star Gamma Cephei. Partly because the observations were at the very limits of instrumental capabilities at the time, astronomers remained skeptical for several years about this and other similar observations. It was thought some of the apparent planets might instead have been brown dwarfs, objects intermediate in mass between planets and stars. In 1990 additional observations were published that supported the existence of the planet orbiting Gamma Cephei, but subsequent work in 1992 again raised serious doubts. Finally, in 2003, improved techniques allowed the planet's existence to be confirmed.

On 21 April 1992, radio astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announced the discovery of two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. This discovery was confirmed, and is generally considered to be the first definitive detection of exoplanets. These pulsar planets are believed to have formed from the unusual remnants of the supernova that produced the pulsar, in a second round of planet formation, or else to be the remaining rocky cores of gas giants that somehow survived the supernova and then decayed into their current orbits.


21 April 2004 Basra bombings

On April 21, 2004, a series of large car bomb explosions ripped through Basra, Iraq. 74 people died and more than 100 were injured. The attacks were some of the deadliest in southern Iraq since the fall of President Saddam Hussein.

Three separate bombs exploded outside police stations in central Basra; two in the Ashar area and one in the Old City. In these bombings, many children on passing buses were killed.

A fourth, separate attack also occurred around the same time in the town of Az Zubayr. In the fourth attack, two car bombs exploded which killed three Iraqis and wounded five British soldiers of the 1st Battalion, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, one seriously. British forces trying to aid casualties were stoned by crowds, who blamed the coalition for not doing enough to protect Iraqi citizens from such attacks.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 22
238 – Year of the Six Emperors: The Roman Senate outlaws emperor Maximinus Thrax for his bloodthirsty proscriptions in Rome and nominates two of its members, Pupienus and Balbinus, to the throne.
1500 – Portuguese navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral lands in Brazil.
1519 – Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés establishes a settlement at Veracruz, Mexico.
1529 – Treaty of Saragossa divides the eastern hemisphere between Spain and Portugal along a line 297.5 leagues or 17° east of the Moluccas.
1622 – The Capture of Ormuz by the East India Company ends Portuguese control of Hormuz Island.
1809 – The second day of the Battle of Eckmühl: the Austrian army is defeated by the First French Empire army led by Napoleon I of France and driven over the Danube in Regensburg.
1836 – Texas Revolution: A day after the Battle of San Jacinto, forces under Texas General Sam Houston capture Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna.
1864 – The U.S. Congress passes the Coinage Act of 1864 that mandates that the inscription In God We Trust be placed on all coins minted as United States currency.
1876 – The first ever National League baseball game is played in Philadelphia.
1889 – At high noon, thousands rush to claim land in the Land Run of 1889. Within hours the cities of Oklahoma City and Guthrie are formed with populations of at least 10,000.
1898 – Spanish-American War: The USS Nashville captures a Spanish merchant ship.
1906 – The 1906 Summer Olympics, not now recognized as part of the official Olympic Games, open in Athens.
1911 – Tsinghua University, one of mainland China's leading universities, is founded.
1912 – Pravda, the "voice" of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg.
1915 – The use of poison gas in World War I escalates when chlorine gas is released as a chemical weapon in the Second Battle of Ypres.
1930 – The United Kingdom, Japan and the United States sign the London Naval Treaty regulating submarine warfare and limiting shipbuilding.
1944 – The 1st Air Commando Group using Sikorsky R-4 helicopters stage the first use of helicopters in combat with CSAR operations in the China-Burma-India theater.
1944 – World War II: Operation Persecution is initiated – Allied forces land in the Hollandia (currently known as Jayapura) area of New Guinea.
1945 – World War II: Prisoners at the Jasenovac concentration camp revolt. 520 are killed and 80 escape.
1945 – World War II: Führerbunker: After learning that Soviet forces have taken Eberswalde without a fight, Adolf Hitler admits defeat in his underground bunker and states that suicide is his only recourse.
1948 – 1948 Arab-Israeli War: Haifa, a major port of Israel, is captured from Arab forces.
1951 – Korean War: The Chinese People's Volunteer Army begin assaulting positions defended by the Royal Australian Regiment and the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry at the Battle of Kapyong.
1954 – Red Scare: Witnesses begin testifying and live television coverage of the Army-McCarthy Hearings begins.
1964 – The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair opens for its first season.
1969 – British yachtsman Sir Robin Knox-Johnston wins the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race and completes the first solo non-stop circumnavigation of the world.
1970 – The first Earth Day is celebrated.
1972 – Vietnam War: Increased American bombing in Vietnam prompts anti-war protests in Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco.
1977 – Optical fiber is first used to carry live telephone traffic.
1983 – The German magazine Der Stern claims that the "Hitler Diaries" had been found in wreckage in East Germany; the diaries are subsequently revealed to be forgeries.
1992 – In an explosion in Guadalajara, Mexico, 206 people are killed, nearly 500 injured and 15,000 left homeless.
1993 – Version 1.0 of the Mosaic web browser is released.
1997 – Haouch Khemisti massacre in Algeria – 93 villagers killed.
1997 – The Japanese embassy hostage crisis ends in Lima, Peru.
1998 – Disney's Animal Kingdom opens at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Florida, United States.
2000 – In a pre-dawn raid, federal agents seize six-year-old Elián González from his relatives' home in Miami, Florida.
2000 – The Big Number Change takes place in the United Kingdom.
2000 – Second Battle of Elephant Pass: Tamil Tigers capture a strategic Sri Lankan Army base and hold it for 8 years.
2004 – Two fuel trains collide in Ryongchon, North Korea, killing up to 150 people.
2005 – Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi apologizes for Japan's war record.
2006 – 243 people are injured in pro-democracy protest in Nepal after Nepali security forces open fire on protesters against King Gyanendra.
2008 – The United States Air Force retires the remaining F-117 Nighthawk aircraft in service.


Treaty of Zaragoza

The Treaty of Zaragoza (Portuguese: Tratado de Saragoça, Spanish: Tratado de Zaragoza), also referred to as the Capitulation of Zaragoza was a peace treaty between Spain and Portugal signed on April 22, 1529 by King John III and the Emperor Charles V, in the Spanish city of Zaragoza. The treaty defined the areas of Spanish and Portuguese influence in Asia to resolve the "Moluccas issue", when both kingdoms claimed the Moluccas islands for themselves, considering it within their exploration area established by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. The conflict sprung in 1520, when the expeditions of both kingdoms reached the Pacific Ocean, since there was not a set limit to the east.


Tsinghua University

Tsinghua University (abbreviation: Tsinghua or THU), is a university located in Beijing. It was originally established in 1911 under the name "Tsinghua College" (清華學堂; Qīnghuá Xuétáng) and had been renamed several times since then, from "Tsinghua School" which was used one year after its establishment to "National Tsinghua University" which was adopted in 1928 after the foundation of its university section in 1925, and now the "Tsinghua University". With a motto of Self-Discipline and Social Commitment, Tsinghua University describes itself as being dedicated to academic excellence, the well-being of Chinese society and to global development. Nowadays, the university is one of the nine tertiary institutes in the C9 League and has been frequently regarded as one of the top two universities in mainland China by most national and international rankings.


Earth Day

Earth Day is an annual event, celebrated on April 22, on which events are held worldwide to demonstrate support for environmental protection. It was first celebrated in 1970, and is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network, and celebrated in more than 192 countries each year.

In 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco, the date proposed was March 21, 1970, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. This day of nature's equipoise was later sanctioned in a Proclamation signed by Secretary General U Thant at the United Nations. A month later a separate Earth Day was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in first held on April 22, 1970. Nelson was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award in recognition of his work. While this April 22 Earth Day was focused on the United States, an organization launched by Denis Hayes, who was the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations. Numerous communities celebrate Earth Week, an entire week of activities focused on environmental issues.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 23
215 BC – A temple is built on the Capitoline Hill dedicated to Venus Erycina to commemorate the Roman defeat at Lake Trasimene.
1014 – Battle of Clontarf: Brian Boru defeats Viking invaders, but is killed in battle.
1016 – Edmund Ironside succeeds his father Æthelred the Unready as king of England,
1343 – Estonia: St. George's Night Uprising.
1348 – The founding of the Order of the Garter by King Edward III is announced on St George's Day.
1516 – Bayerische Reinheitsgebot is signed in Ingolstadt.
1521 – Battle of Villalar: King Charles I of Spain defeats the Comuneros.
1635 – The first public school in the United States, Boston Latin School, is founded in Boston, Massachusetts.
1655 – The Siege of Santo Domingo begins during the Anglo-Spanish War, and fails seven days later.
1660 – Treaty of Oliwa is established between Sweden and Poland.
1661 – King Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland is crowned in Westminster Abbey.
1815 – The Second Serbian Uprising – a second phase of the national revolution of the Serbs against the Ottoman Empire, erupts shortly after the annexation of the country to the Ottoman Empire.
1910 – Theodore Roosevelt makes his "The Man in the Arena" speech.
1918 – World War I: The British Royal Navy makes a raid in an attempt to neutralise the Belgian port of Bruges-Zeebrugge.
1920 – The national council in Turkey denounces the government of Sultan Mehmed VI and announces a temporary constitution.
1920 – The Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM) is founded in Ankara.
1927 – Turkey becomes the first country to celebrate Children's Day as a national holiday.
1927 – Cardiff City defeat Arsenal in the FA Cup Final, the only time it has been won by a team not based in England.
1932 – The 153-year old De Adriaan Windmill in Haarlem, Netherlands burns down. It is rebuilt and reopens exactly 70 years later.
1935 – The Polish Constitution of 1935 is adopted.
1940 – The Rhythm Night Club fire at a dance hall in Natchez, Mississippi, kills 198 people.
1941 – World War II: The Greek government and King George II evacuate Athens before the invading Wehrmacht.
1942 – World War II: Baedeker Blitz – German bombers hit Exeter, Bath and York in retaliation for the British raid on Lübeck.
1945 – Adolf Hitler's designated successor Hermann Göring sends him a telegram asking permission to take leadership of the Third Reich, which causes Hitler to replace him with Joseph Goebbels and Karl Dönitz.
1946 – Manuel Roxas is elected the last President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines.
1949 – Chinese Civil War: Establishment of the People's Liberation Army Navy.
1951 – American journalist William N. Oatis is arrested for espionage by the Communist government of Czechoslovakia.
1955 – The Canadian Labour Congress is formed by the merger of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada and the Canadian Congress of Labour.
1961 – Algiers putsch by French generals.
1967 – Soviet space program: Soyuz 1 (Russian: Союз 1, Union 1) a manned spaceflight carrying cosmonaut Colonel Vladimir Komarov is launched into orbit.
1968 – Vietnam War: Student protesters at Columbia University in New York City take over administration buildings and shut down the university.
1971 – Bangladesh Liberation War: The Pakistan Army and Razakars massacred approximately 3,000 Hindu emigrants in the Jathibhanga area of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
1985 – Coca-Cola changes its formula and releases New Coke. The response is overwhelmingly negative, and the original formula is back on the market in less than 3 months.
1990 – Namibia becomes the 160th member of the United Nations and the 50th member of the Commonwealth of Nations.
1993 – Eritreans vote overwhelmingly for independence from Ethiopia in a United Nations-monitored referendum.
1993 – Sri Lankan politician Lalith Athulathmudali is assassinated while addressing a gathering, approximately 4 weeks ahead of the Provincial Council elections for the Western Province.
1997 – Omaria massacre in Algeria: 42 villagers are killed.


Battle of Clontarf

The Battle of Clontarf (Irish: Cath Chluain Tarbh) took place on 23 April 1014 between the forces of Brian Boru and the forces led by the King of Leinster, Máel Mórda mac Murchada: composed mainly of his own men, Viking mercenaries from Dublin and the Orkney Islands led by his cousin Sigtrygg, as well as the one rebellious king from the province of Ulster. It ended in a rout of the Máel Mórda's forces, along with the death of Brian, who was killed by a few Norsemen who were fleeing the battle and stumbled upon his tent. After the battle, Ireland returned to a fractious status quo between the many small, separate kingdoms that had existed for some time.


St. George's Night Uprising

St. George’s Night Uprising in 1343–1346 (Estonian: Jüriöö ülestõus, Estonian pronunciation: [jyriøø ylestɤus]) was an unsuccessful attempt by the indigenous Estonian population in the Duchy of Estonia, the Bishopric of Ösel-Wiek, and the insular territories of the State of the Teutonic Order to rid themselves of the Danish and German rulers and landlords, who had conquered the country in the 13th century during the Livonian crusade, and to eradicate the non-indigenous Christian religion. After initial success the revolt was ended by the invasion of the Teutonic Order. In 1346 the Duchy of Estonia was sold for 19,000 Köln marks by the King of Denmark to the Teutonic Order. The shift of sovereignty from Denmark to the State of the Teutonic Order took place on November 1, 1346.


Citizenship in a Republic

Citizenship in a Republic is the title of a speech given by the former President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt at the Sorbonne in Paris, France on April 23, 1910.

One notable passage on page seven of the 35-page speech is referred to as "The Man in the Arena":

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Someone who is heavily involved in a situation that requires courage, skill, or tenacity (as opposed to someone sitting on the sidelines and watching), is sometimes referred to as "the man in the arena."

The title – as the reference to "dust and sweat and blood" – echoes Spanish bullfighting and Roman gladiatorial combat.

The "Man in the Arena" passage was quoted by another US president, Richard Nixon, both in his victory speech on November 6, 1968, and in his resignation address to the nation on August 8, 1974:

Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed, but always I have taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena, 'whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, [...]

Nelson Mandela also gave a copy of this speech to François Pienaar, captain of the South African rugby team, before the start of the 1995 Rugby World Cup,[4] in which the South African side eventually defeated the heavily favoured All Blacks. In the film based on those events, the poem Invictus is used instead.

Mark DeRosa, an American professional baseball utility player then with the Washington Nationals, read the passage to teammates prior to the Nationals' pivotal Game Four versus the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2012 National League Division Series which was won on a walk-off home run by the Nationals' Jayson Werth. Since his days at the University of Pennsylvania, DeRosa would turn to those words before important games.


Soyuz 1

Soyuz 1 (Russian: Союз 1, Union 1) was a manned spaceflight of the Soviet space program. Launched into orbit on April 23, 1967 carrying cosmonaut Colonel Vladimir Komarov, Soyuz 1 was the first flight of the Soyuz spacecraft. The mission plan was complex, involving a rendezvous with Soyuz 2, swapping crew members before returning to Earth.

Soyuz 1 was plagued with technical issues, and Komarov was killed when the spacecraft crashed during its return to Earth. This was the first in-flight fatality in the history of spaceflight.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 24

1479 BC – Thutmose III ascends to the throne of Egypt, although power effectively shifts to Hatshepsut (according to the Low Chronology of the 18th Dynasty).
1184 BC – Traditional date of the fall of Troy.
1547 – Battle of Mühlberg. Duke of Alba, commanding Spanish-Imperial forces of Charles I of Spain, defeats the troops of Schmalkaldic League.
1558 – Mary, Queen of Scots, marries the Dauphin of France, François, at Notre Dame de Paris.
1704 – The first regular newspaper in British Colonial America, the News-Letter, is published in Boston, Massachusetts.
1800 – The United States Library of Congress is established when President John Adams signs legislation to appropriate $5,000 USD to purchase "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress".
1877 – Russo-Turkish War: Russian Empire declares war on Ottoman Empire.
1885 – American sharpshooter Annie Oakley was hired by Nate Salsbury to be a part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
1904 – The Lithuanian press ban is lifted after almost 40 years.
1907 – Hersheypark, founded by Milton S. Hershey for the exclusive use of his employees, is opened.
1913 – The Woolworth Building skyscraper in New York City is opened.
1915 – The arrest of 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Istanbul marks the beginning of the Armenian Genocide.
1916 – Easter Rising: The Irish Republican Brotherhood led by nationalists Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, and Joseph Plunkett starts a rebellion in Ireland.
1916 – Ernest Shackleton and five men of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition launch a lifeboat from uninhabited Elephant Island in the Southern Ocean to organise a rescue for the ice-trapped ship Endurance.
1918 – First tank-to-tank combat, at Villers-Bretonneux, France, when three British Mark IVs meet three German A7Vs.
1922 – The first segment of the Imperial Wireless Chain providing wireless telegraphy between Leafield in Oxfordshire, England, and Cairo, Egypt, comes into operation.
1923 – In Vienna, the paper Das Ich und das Es (The Ego and the Id) by Sigmund Freud is published, which outlines Freud's theories of the id, ego, and super-ego.
1926 – The Treaty of Berlin is signed. Germany and the Soviet Union each pledge neutrality in the event of an attack on the other by a third party for the next five years.
1932 – Benny Rothman leads the mass trespass of Kinder Scout, leading to substantial legal reforms in the United Kingdom.
1933 – Nazi Germany begins its persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses by shutting down the Watch Tower Society office in Magdeburg.
1953 – Winston Churchill is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
1955 – The Bandung Conference ends: 29 non-aligned nations of Asia and Africa finish a meeting that condemns colonialism, racism, and the Cold War.
1957 – Suez Crisis: The Suez Canal is reopened following the introduction of UNEF peacekeepers to the region.
1963 – Marriage of HRH Princess Alexandra of Kent to the Hon Angus Ogilvy at Westminster Abbey in London.
1965 – Civil war breaks out in the Dominican Republic when Colonel Francisco Caamaño, overthrows the triumvirate that had been in power since the coup d'état against Juan Bosch.
1967 – Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when its parachute fails to open. He is the first human to die during a space mission.
1967 – Vietnam War: American General William Westmoreland says in a news conference that the enemy had "gained support in the United States that gives him hope that he can win politically that which he cannot win militarily."
1968 – Mauritius becomes a member state of the United Nations.
1970 – The first Chinese satellite, Dong Fang Hong I, is launched.
1970 – The Gambia becomes a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations, with Dawda Jawara as the first President.
1971 – Soyuz 10 docks with Salyut 1.
1980 – Eight U.S. servicemen die in Operation Eagle Claw as they attempt to end the Iran hostage crisis.
1990 – STS-31: The Hubble Space Telescope is launched from the Space Shuttle Discovery.
Shuttle mission STS-31 lifts off, carrying Hubble into orbit.
1990 – Gruinard Island, Scotland, is officially declared free of the anthrax disease after 48 years of quarantine.
1993 – An IRA bomb devastates the Bishopsgate area of London.
1996 – In the United States, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 is passed into law.
2004 – The United States lifts economic sanctions imposed on Libya 18 years previously, as a reward for its cooperation in eliminating weapons of mass destruction.
2005 – Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is inaugurated as the 265th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church taking the name Pope Benedict XVI.
2005 – Snuppy becomes world's first cloned dog.
2013 – At least 87 people are killed and 600 injured when a building collapses in Dhaka, Bangladesh.


The fall of Troy

The end of the war came with one final plan. Odysseus devised a new ruse—a giant hollow wooden horse, an animal that was sacred to the Trojans. It was built by Epeius and guided by Athena, from the wood of a cornel tree grove sacred to Apollo, with the inscription:

The Greeks dedicate this thank-offering to Athena for their return home.

The hollow horse was filled with soldiers led by Odysseus. The rest of the army burned the camp and sailed for Tenedos.

When the Trojans discovered that the Greeks were gone, believing the war was over, they "joyfully dragged the horse inside the city", while they debated what to do with it. Some thought they ought to hurl it down from the rocks, others thought they should burn it, while others said they ought to dedicate it to Athena.

Both Cassandra and Laocoön warned against keeping the horse. While Cassandra had been given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, she was also cursed by Apollo never to be believed. Serpents then came out of the sea and devoured either Laocoön and one of his two sons, Laocoön and both his sons, or only his sons, a portent which so alarmed the followers of Aeneas that they withdrew to Ida. The Trojans decided to keep the horse and turned to a night of mad revelry and celebration. Sinon, an Achaean spy, signaled the fleet stationed at Tenedos when "it was midnight and the clear moon was rising" and the soldiers from inside the horse emerged and killed the guards.

The Acheans entered the city and killed the sleeping population. A great massacre followed which continued into the day.

Blood ran in torrents, drenched was all the earth,
As Trojans and their alien helpers died.
Here were men lying quelled by bitter death
All up and down the city in their blood.

The Trojans, fuelled with desperation, fought back fiercely, despite being disorganized and leaderless. With the fighting at its height, some donned fallen enemies' attire and launched surprise counterattacks in the chaotic street fighting. Other defenders hurled down roof tiles and anything else heavy down on the rampaging attackers. The outlook was grim though, and eventually the remaining defenders were destroyed along with the whole city.

Neoptolemus killed Priam, who had taken refuge at the altar of Zeus of the Courtyard. Menelaus killed Deiphobus, Helen's husband after Paris' death, and also intended to kill Helen, but, overcome by her beauty, threw down his sword and took her to the ships.

Ajax the Lesser raped Cassandra on Athena's altar while she was clinging to her statue. Because of Ajax's impiety, the Acheaens, urged by Odysseus, wanted to stone him to death, but he fled to Athena's altar, and was spared.

Antenor, who had given hospitality to Menelaus and Odysseus when they asked for the return of Helen, and who had advocated so, was spared, along with his family. Aeneas took his father on his back and fled, and, according to Apollodorus, was allowed to go because of his piety.

The Greeks then burned the city and divided the spoils. Cassandra was awarded to Agamemnon. Neoptolemus got Andromache, wife of Hector, and Odysseus was given Hecuba, Priam's wife.

The Achaeans threw Hector's infant son Astyanax down from the walls of Troy, either out of cruelty and hate or to end the royal line, and the possibility of a son's revenge They (by usual tradition Neoptolemus) also sacrificed the Trojan princess Polyxena on the grave of Achilles as demanded by his ghost, either as part of his spoil or because she had betrayed him.

Aethra, Theseus' mother, and one of Helen's handmaids, was rescued by her grandsons, Demophon and Acamas.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide[4] (Armenian: Հայոց Ցեղասպանություն, [hɑˈjɔtsʰ tsʰɛʁɑspɑnuˈtʰjun]), also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, traditionally among Armenians, as the Great Crime (Armenian: Մեծ Եղեռն, [mɛts jɛˈʁɛrn]; English transliteration: Medz Yeghern [Medz/Great + Yeghern/Crime] was the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of its minority Armenian subjects from their historic homeland in the territory constituting the present-day Republic of Turkey. It took place during and after World War I and was implemented in two phases: the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and forced labor, and the deportation of women, children, the elderly and infirm on death marches to the Syrian Desert. The total number of people killed as a result has been estimated at between 1 and 1.5 million. The Assyrians, the Greeks and other minority groups were similarly targeted for extermination by the Ottoman government, and their treatment is considered by many historians to be part of the same genocidal policy.

It is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides, as scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out to eliminate the Armenians, and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust. The word genocide was coined in order to describe these events.

The starting date of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day when Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of the Armenian genocide.

Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide. To date, twenty countries have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars and historians accept this view.


Voyage of the James Caird

Elephant Island was remote, uninhabited, and rarely visited by whalers or any other ships. If the party was to return to civilization it would be necessary to summon help. The only realistic way this could be done was to adapt one of the lifeboats for an 800-mile (1,300 km) voyage across the Southern Ocean, to South Georgia. Shackleton had abandoned thoughts of taking the party on the less dangerous journey to Deception Island, because of the poor physical condition of many of his party. Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands was closer than South Georgia, but could not be reached, as this would require sailing against the strong prevailing winds.

Shackleton selected the boat party: himself, Worsley as navigator, Crean, McNish, John Vincent and Timothy McCarthy. On instructions from Shackleton, McNish immediately set about adapting the James Caird, improvising tools and materials. Frank Wild was to be left in charge of the Elephant Island party, with instructions to make for Deception Island the following spring, should Shackleton not return. Shackleton took supplies for only four weeks, knowing that if land had not been reached within that time the boat would be lost.

The 22.5-foot (6.85 m) James Caird was launched on 24 April 1916. The success of the voyage depended on the pin-point accuracy of Worsley's navigation, using observations that would have to be made in the most unfavourable of conditions. The prevailing wind was helpfully north-west, but the heavy sea conditions quickly soaked everything in icy water. Soon ice settled thickly on the boat, making her ride sluggishly. On 5 May a north-westerly gale almost caused the boat's destruction as it faced what Shackleton described as the largest waves he had seen in twenty-six years at sea. On 8 May South Georgia was sighted, after a 14-day battle with the elements that had driven the boat party to their physical limits. Two days later, after a prolonged struggle with heavy seas and hurricane-force winds to the south of the island, the party struggled ashore at King Haakon Bay.


Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany

Jehovah's Witnesses suffered religious persecution in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 after refusing to perform military service, join Nazi organizations or give allegiance to the Hitler regime. An estimated 10,000 Witnesses—half of the number of members in Germany during that period—were imprisoned, including 2000 who were sent to concentration camps. An estimated 1200 died in custody, including 250 who were executed. They were the first Christian denomination banned in the Third Reich and the most extensively and intensively persecuted. Unlike Jews and Gypsies who were persecuted on the basis of their ethnicity, Jehovah's Witnesses could escape persecution and personal harm by renouncing their religious beliefs by signing a document indicating renouncement of their faith, submission to state authority, and support of the German military. Historian Sybil Milton concludes that "their courage and defiance in the face of torture and death punctures the myth of a monolithic Nazi state ruling over docile and submissive subjects."

The group came under increasing public and governmental persecution from 1933, with many expelled from jobs and schools, deprived of income and suffering beatings and imprisonment, despite early attempts to demonstrate shared goals with the National Socialist regime. Historians are divided over whether the Nazis intended to exterminate them, but several authors have claimed the Witnesses' militancy and outspoken condemnation of the Nazis contributed to their level of suffering.


STS-31

STS-31 was the thirty-fifth mission of the American Space Shuttle program, which launched the Hubble Space Telescope astronomical observatory into Earth orbit. The mission used the Space Shuttle Discovery, which lifted off from Launch Pad 39B on 24 April 1990 from Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

Discovery's crew deployed the telescope on 25 April, and spent the rest of the mission tending to various scientific experiments in the shuttle's payload bay and operating a set of IMAX cameras to record the mission. Discovery's launch marked the first time since January 1986 that two Space Shuttles had been on the launch pad at the same time – Discovery on 39B and Columbia on 39A.

Launched 24 April 1990, 8:33:51 am EDT. Launch scheduled for 18 April, then 12 April, then 10 April, following Flight Readiness Review (FRR). First time date set at FRR was earlier than that shown on previous planning schedules. Launch 10 April scrubbed at T-4 minutes due to faulty valve in auxiliary power unit (APU) number one. APU replaced and payload batteries recharged. Countdown briefly halted at T-31 seconds when computer software failed to shut down a fuel valve line on ground support equipment. Engineers ordered valve to shut and countdown continued. Launch Weight: 112,994 kilograms (249,110 lb).

STS-31 was the tenth launch of the Shuttle Discovery. On board were Charles Bolden, Loren Shriver, Bruce McCandless, Steven Hawley, and Kathryn D. Sullivan.

The primary payload was the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), deployed in a 380 statute mile (612 kilometres (380 mi)) orbit. The shuttle's orbit in this mission was its second highest orbit up to that date, in order that the HST could be released near to its operational altitude well outside of the atmosphere. Discovery orbited the earth 80 times during the mission.

The main purpose of this mission was to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) astronomical observatory. It was designed to operate above the Earth's turbulent and obscuring atmosphere to observe celestial objects at ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared wavelengths. This was a joint NASA-ESA effort. The rest of the mission was devoted to photography and onboard experiments. To launch HST into an orbit that guaranteed longevity, Discovery soared to 600 kilometres (370 mi) – the highest shuttle altitude ever at the time. The record height permitted the crew to photograph earth's large scale geographic features not apparent from lower orbits. Motion pictures were recorded by two IMAX cameras, and the results appeared in the IMAX film Destiny in Space. Experiment activity included a biomedical technology study, advanced materials research; particle contamination and ionizing radiation measurements; and student science project studying zero gravity effects on electronic arcs. Discovery’s reentry from its higher than usual orbit required a deorbit burn of 4 min 58 s, the longest in shuttle history up to that time.

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 25

404 BC – Peloponnesian War: Lysander's Spartan Armies defeated the Athenians and the war ends.
1134 – The name Zagreb was mentioned for the first time in the Felician Charter relating to the establishment of the Zagreb Bishopric around 1094.
1607 – Eighty Years' War: The Dutch fleet destroys the anchored Spanish fleet at Gibraltar.
1644 – The Chongzhen Emperor, the last Emperor of Ming Dynasty China, commits suicide during a peasant rebellion led by Li Zicheng.
1707 – The Habsburg army is defeated by Bourbon army at Almansa (Spain) in the War of the Spanish Succession.
1792 – Highwayman Nicolas J. Pelletier becomes the first person executed by guillotine.
1792 – La Marseillaise (the French national anthem) is composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
1804 – The western Georgian kingdom of Imereti accepts the suzerainty of the Russian Empire
1829 – Charles Fremantle arrives in HMS Challenger off the coast of modern-day Western Australia prior to declaring the Swan River Colony for the United Kingdom.
1846 – Thornton Affair: Open conflict begins over the disputed border of Texas, triggering the Mexican-American War.
1847 – The last survivors of the Donner Party are out of the wilderness.
1849 – The Governor General of Canada, Lord Elgin, signs the Rebellion Losses Bill, outraging Montreal's English population and triggering the Montreal Riots.
1859 – British and French engineers break ground for the Suez Canal.
1862 – American Civil War: Forces under Union Admiral David Farragut demand the surrender of the Confederate city of New Orleans, Louisiana.
1864 – American Civil War: The Battle of Marks' Mills.
1898 – Spanish-American War: The United States declares war on Spain.
1901 – New York becomes the first U.S. state to require automobile license plates.
1915 – World War I: The Battle of Gallipoli begins—The invasion of the Turkish Gallipoli Peninsula by Australian, British, French and New Zealand troops begins with landings at Anzac Cove and Cape Helles.
1916 – Easter Rebellion: The United Kingdom declares martial law in Ireland.
1916 – Anzac Day is commemorated for the first time on the first anniversary of the landing at Anzac Cove.
1920 – At the San Remo conference, the principal Allied Powers of World War I adopt a resolution to determine the allocation of Class "A" League of Nations mandates for administration of the former Ottoman-ruled lands of the Middle East.
1938 – U.S. Supreme Court delivers its opinion in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins and overturns a century of federal common law.
1943 – The Demyansk Shield for German troops in commemoration of Demyansk Pocket is instituted.
1944 – The United Negro College Fund is incorporated.
1945 – Elbe Day: United States and Soviet troops meet in Torgau along the River Elbe, cutting the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany in two, a milestone in the approaching end of World War II in Europe.
1945 – The Nazi occupation army surrenders and leaves Northern Italy after a general partisan insurrection by the Italian resistance movement; the puppet fascist regime dissolves and Benito Mussolini tries to escape. This day is taken as symbolic of the Liberation of Italy.
1945 – Fifty nations gather in San Francisco, California to begin the United Nations Conference on International Organizations.
1945 – The last German troops retreat from Finland's soil in Lapland, ending the Lapland War. Military acts of Second World War end in Finland.
1951 – Korean War: Assaulting Chinese forces are forced to withdraw after heavy fighting with UN forces, primarily made up of Australian and Canadian troops, at the Battle of Kapyong.
1953 – Francis Crick and James D. Watson publish "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" describing the double helix structure of DNA.
1959 – The St. Lawrence Seaway, linking the North American Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, officially opens to shipping.
1960 – The U.S. Navy submarine USS Triton completes the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe.
1961 – Robert Noyce is granted a patent for an integrated circuit.
1965 – Teenage sniper Michael Andrew Clark kills three and wounds six others shooting from a hilltop along Highway 101 just south of Santa Maria, California.
1966 – The city of Tashkent is destroyed by a huge earthquake.
1972 – Vietnam War: Nguyen Hue Offensive – The North Vietnamese 320th Division forces 5,000 South Vietnamese troops to retreat and traps about 2,500 others northwest of Kontum.
1974 – Carnation Revolution: A leftist military coup in Portugal overthrows the fascist Estado Novo regime and establishes a democratic government.
1975 – As North Vietnamese forces close in on the South Vietnamese capital Saigon, the Australian Embassy is closed and evacuated, almost ten years to the day since the first Australian troop commitment to South Vietnam.
1981 – More than 100 workers are exposed to radiation during repairs of a nuclear power plant in Tsuruga, Japan.
1982 – Israel completes its withdrawal from the Sinai peninsula per the Camp David Accords.
1983 – American schoolgirl Samantha Smith is invited to visit the Soviet Union by its leader Yuri Andropov after he read her letter in which she expressed fears about nuclear war.
1983 – Pioneer 10 travels beyond Pluto's orbit.
1986 – Mswati III is crowned King of Swaziland, succeeding his father Sobhuza II.
1988 – In Israel, John Demjanuk is sentenced to death for war crimes committed in World War II.
1990 – Violeta Chamorro takes office as the President of Nicaragua, the first woman to hold the position.
2003 – The Human Genome Project is completed two and a half years earlier than expected.
2005 – The final piece of the Obelisk of Axum is returned to Ethiopia after being stolen by the invading Italian army in 1937.
2005 – Bulgaria and Romania sign accession treaties to join the European Union.
2005 – 107 die in Amagasaki rail crash in Japan.
2007 – Boris Yeltsin's funeral – the first to be sanctioned by the Russian Orthodox Church for a head of state since the funeral of Emperor Alexander III in 1894.


Li Zicheng

Li advocated the slogan of "dividing land equally and abolishing the grain taxes payment system" which won great support of peasants. The song of "killing cattle and sheep, preparing tasty wine and opening the city gate to welcome the Dashing King" was widely spread at that time.

The 1642 Kaifeng flood (during the 3rd Battle of Taifeng), caused by breaches of the Yellow River dykes by both sides, ended the siege of Kaifeng and killed over 300,000 of its 378,000 residents. After the battles of Luoyang and Kaifeng, the Ming government was unable to stop Li's rebellion, as most of its military force was involved in the battle against the Manchurians in the north. Li declared himself King of Shun Dynasty in Xi'an, Shaanxi.

In 1642, Li captured Xiangyang, the current Xiangfan city, and claimed himself King Xinshun.

In April 1644, Li's rebels sacked the Ming capital of Beijing, and the Chongzhen Emperor committed suicide. Li proclaimed himself as the Emperor of Shun Dynasty.

After Li's army was defeated on 27 May 1644 at the Battle of Shanhai Pass by the combined forces of the defecting Ming general Wu Sangui and the Manchurians, Li fled from Beijing towards his base in Shaanxi.

After a number of defeats Li Zicheng disappeared. In the long term, it led to the development of myths and legends concerning Li. The principal one being that he was a great hope. Some folk tales hold that Li survived after his defeats and became a monk for the rest of his life. Li mysteriously disappeared and there were different theories about his death too, at the age of 40. Some suggested that he committed suicide by hanging himself on a lotus tree, while others thought that he was killed by pro-Ming militia during his escape in 1645. It is thought that in 1645, Li Zicheng was killed in battle at Mount Jiugong. He fled into the south, in present-day Hubei Province.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Spanish–American War

The Spanish–American War was a conflict in 1898 between Spain and the United States, effectively the result of American intervention in the Cuban War of Independence. American attacks on Spain's Pacific possessions led to involvement in the Philippine Revolution and ultimately to the Philippine–American War.

Revolts against Spanish rule had occurred for some years in Cuba. There had been war scares before, as in the Virginius Affair in 1873. In the late 1890's, American public opinion was agitated by anti-Spanish propaganda led by journalists such as Joseph Pulitzer which used yellow journalism to criticize Spanish administration of Cuba. After the mysterious sinking of the American battleship Maine in Havana harbor, political pressures from the Democratic Party and certain industrialists pushed the administration of Republican President William McKinley into a war he had wished to avoid. Compromise was sought by Spain, but rejected by the United States which sent an ultimatum to Spain demanding it surrender control of Cuba. First Madrid, then Washington, formally declared war.

Although the main issue was Cuban independence, the ten-week war was fought in both the Caribbean and the Pacific, revealing American interest in both Cuba and Spain's Pacific territories of Guam and the Philippines. American naval power proved decisive, allowing U.S. expeditionary forces to disembark in Cuba against a Spanish garrison which had been fighting insurgent attacks for some time. Spanish forces and Cuban rebels had all been suffering from yellow fever. Cuban, Philippine, and American forces obtained the surrender of Santiago de Cuba and Manila owing to their numerical superiority in most of the battles and despite the good performance of some Spanish infantry units and spirited defenses in places such as San Juan Hill. With two obsolete Spanish squadrons sunk in Santiago de Cuba and Manila Bay and a third, more modern fleet recalled home to protect the Spanish coasts, Madrid sued for peace.

The result was the 1898 Treaty of Paris, negotiated on terms favorable to the U.S., which allowed temporary American control of Cuba, ceded indefinite colonial authority over Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippine islands from Spain. The defeat and collapse of the Spanish Empire was a profound shock to Spain's national psyche, and provoked a thoroughgoing philosophical and artistic reevaluation of Spanish society known as the Generation of '98. The United States gained several island possessions spanning the globe and a rancorous new debate over the wisdom of expansionism.


Gallipoli Campaign

The Gallipoli Campaign, also known as the Dardanelles Campaign or the Battle of Gallipoli or the Battle of Çanakkale (Turkish: Çanakkale Savaşı), took place on the Gallipoli peninsula in the Ottoman Empire (now Gelibolu in modern day Turkey) between 25 April 1915 and 9 January 1916, during the First World War. A joint British and French operation was mounted to capture the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (Istanbul) and secure a sea route to Russia. The attempt failed, with heavy casualties on both sides. The campaign was considered one of the greatest victories of the Turks and was reflected on as a major failure by the Allies.

The Gallipoli campaign resonated profoundly among all nations involved. In Turkey, the battle is perceived as a defining moment in the history of the Turkish people—a final surge in the defence of the motherland as the ageing Ottoman Empire was crumbling. The struggle laid the grounds for the Turkish War of Independence and the foundation of the Republic of Turkey eight years later under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, himself a commander at Gallipoli.

The campaign was the first major battle undertaken in the war by Australia and New Zealand, and is often considered to mark the birth of national consciousness in both of these countries. Anzac Day, 25 April, remains the most significant commemoration of military casualties and veterans in Australia and New Zealand, surpassing Armistice Day/Remembrance Day.


Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid

"Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" was an article published by Francis Crick and James D. Watson in the scientific journal Nature in its 171st volume on pages 737–738 (dated 25 April 1953). It was the first publication which described the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. This discovery had a major impact on biology, particularly in the field of genetics.

This article is often termed a "pearl" of science because it is brief and contains the answer to a fundamental mystery about living organisms. This mystery was the question of how it was possible that genetic instructions were held inside organisms and how they were passed from generation to generation. The article presents a simple and elegant solution, which surprised many biologists at the time who believed that DNA transmission was going to be more difficult to detail and understand.


Human Genome Project

The Human Genome Project (HGP) is an international scientific research project with a primary goal of determining the sequence of chemical base pairs which make up DNA, and of identifying and mapping the approximately 20,000–25,000 genes of the human genome from both a physical and functional standpoint.

The first official funding for the Project originated with the Department of Energy’s Office of Health and Environmental Research, headed by Charles DeLisi, and was in the Reagan Administration’s 1987 budget submission to the Congress. It subsequently passed both Houses. The Project was planned for 15 years.

In 1990, the two major funding agencies, DOE and NIH, developed a memorandum of understanding in order to coordinate plans, and set the clock for initiation of the Project to 1990. At that time David Galas was Director of the renamed “Office of Biological and Environmental Research” in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and James Watson headed the NIH Genome Program. In 1993 Aristides Patrinos succeeded Galas, and Francis Collins succeeded James Watson, and assumed the role of overall Project Head as Director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Human Genome Research Institute. A working draft of the genome was announced in 2000 and a complete one in 2003, with further, more detailed analysis still being published.

A parallel project was conducted outside of government by the Celera Corporation, or Celera Genomics, which was formally launched in 1998. Most of the government-sponsored sequencing was performed in universities and research centres from the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany and Spain. Researchers continue to identify protein-coding genes and their functions; the objective is to find disease-causing genes and possibly use the information to develop more specific treatments. It also may be possible to locate patterns in gene expression, which could help physicians glean insight into the body's emergent properties.

While the objective of the Human Genome Project is to understand the genetic makeup of the human species, the project has also focused on several other nonhuman organisms such as Escherichia coli, the fruit fly, and the laboratory mouse. It remains one of the largest single investigative projects in modern science.

The Human Genome Project originally aimed to map the nucleotides contained in a human haploid reference genome (more than three billion). Several groups have announced efforts to extend this to diploid human genomes including the International HapMap Project, Applied Biosystems, Perlegen, Illumina, J. Craig Venter Institute, Personal Genome Project, and Roche-454.

The "genome" of any given individual (except for identical twins and cloned organisms) is unique; mapping "the human genome" involves sequencing multiple variations of each gene. The project did not study the entire DNA found in human cells; some heterochromatic areas (about 8% of the total genome) remain unsequenced.

Among the many social and ethical issues spurred by bio-genetic sciences is a concern regarding bio-genetic warfare (e.g. ethnic bio-weapons targeted towards specific populations).

[Duke of Buckingham]

April 26
1336 – Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) ascends Mont Ventoux.
1478 – The Pazzi attack Lorenzo de' Medici and kill his brother Giuliano during High Mass in the Duomo of Florence.
1564 – Playwright William Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England (date of actual birth is unknown).
1607 – English colonists make landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia.
1721 – A massive earthquake devastates the Iranian city of Tabriz.
1802 – Napoleon Bonaparte signs a general amnesty to allow all but about one thousand of the most notorious émigrés of the French Revolution to return to France, as part of a reconciliary gesture with the factions of the Ancien Regime and to eventually consolidate his own rule.
1803 – Thousands of meteor fragments fall from the skies of L'Aigle, France; the event convinces European science that meteors exist.
1805 – First Barbary War: United States Marines captured Derne under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon.
1865 – American Civil War: Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrenders his army to General William Tecumseh Sherman at the Bennett Place near Durham, North Carolina. Also the date of Confederate Memorial Day for two states.
1865 – Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia.
1923 – The Duke of York weds Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon at Westminster Abbey.
1925 – Paul von Hindenburg defeats Wilhelm Marx in the second round of the German presidential election to become the first directly elected head of state of the Weimar Republic.
1933 – The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established.
1937 – Spanish Civil War: Guernica (or Gernika in Basque), Spain is bombed by German Luftwaffe.
1942 – Benxihu Colliery accident in Manchukuo leaves 1549 Chinese miners dead.
1944 – Georgios Papandreou becomes head of the Greek government-in-exile based in Egypt.
1944 – Heinrich Kreipe is captured by Allied commandos in occupied Crete.
1945 – World War II: Battle of Bautzen – last successful German tank-offensive of the war and last noteworthy victory of the Wehrmacht.
1945 – World War II: Filipino troops of the 66th Infantry Regiment, Philippine Commonwealth Army, USAFIP-NL and the American troops of the 33rd and 37th Infantry Division, United States Army was liberated in Baguio City and they fought against the Japanese forces under by General Tomoyuki Yamashita.
1946 – Naperville train disaster kills 47.
1954 – The Geneva Conference, an effort to restore peace in Indochina and Korea, begins.
1956 – SS Ideal X, the world's first successful container ship, leaves Port Newark, New Jersey for Houston, Texas.
1958 – Final run of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Royal Blue from Washington, D.C., to New York City after 68 years, the first U.S. passenger train to use electric locomotives.
1960 – Forced out by the April Revolution, President of South Korea Syngman Rhee resigns after twelve years of dictatorial rule.
1962 – NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.
1963 – In Libya, amendments to the constitution transform Libya (United Kingdom of Libya) into one national unity (Kingdom of Libya) and allows for female participation in elections.
1964 – Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania.
1965 – A Rolling Stones concert in London, Ontario is shut down by police after 15 minutes due to rioting.
1966 – An earthquake of magnitude 7.5 destroys Tashkent.
1966 – A new government is formed in the Republic of Congo, led by Ambroise Noumazalaye.
1970 – The Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization enters into force.
1981 – Dr. Michael R. Harrison of the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center performs the world's first human open fetal surgery.
1982 – 57 people are killed by former police officer Woo Bum-kon in a shooting spree in Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea.
1986 – A nuclear reactor accident occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), creating the world's worst nuclear disaster.
1989 – The deadliest tornado in world history strikes Central Bangladesh, killing upwards of 1,300, injuring 12,000, and leaving as many as 80,000 homeless.
1989 – People's Daily publishes the People's Daily editorial of April 26 which inflames the nascent Tiananmen Square protests
1991 – Seventy tornadoes break out in the central United States. Before the outbreak's end, Andover, Kansas, would record the year's only F5 tornado (see Andover, Kansas Tornado Outbreak).
1994 – China Airlines Flight 140 crashes at Nagoya Airport in Japan, killing 264 of the 271 people on board.
2002 – Robert Steinhäuser infiltrates and kills 16 at Gutenberg-Gymnasium in Erfurt, Germany before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot.
2005 – Under international pressure, Syria withdraws the last of its 14,000 troop military garrison in Lebanon, ending its 29-year military domination of that country (Syrian occupation of Lebanon).


Bombing of Guernica

The bombing of Guernica (April 26, 1937) was an aerial attack on the Basque town of Guernica, Spain, causing widespread destruction and civilian deaths, during the Spanish Civil War. The raid by planes of the German Luftwaffe "Condor Legion" and the Italian Fascist Aviazione Legionaria was called Operation Rügen.

The number of victims of the attack is disputed; The Basque government reported 1,654 people killed, although modern speculations suggests between 126 to 400 civilians died. Russian archives reveal 800 deaths on May 1, 1937, but this number may not include victims who later died of their injuries in hospitals or whose bodies were discovered buried in the rubble. The bombing has often been considered one of the first raids in the history of modern military aviation on a defenceless civilian population, although the capital (Madrid) had been bombed many times previously. The bombing was the subject of a famous anti-war painting by Pablo Picasso. It was depicted by Heinz Kiwitz, a German artist who made a woodcut of it and later was killed fighting in the International Brigades. The bombing shocked and inspired many artists: Guernica is also the name of one of the most violent of René Iché sculptures, one of the first electroacoustic music by Patrick Ascione, of a musical composition by René-Louis Baron and a poem by Paul Eluard (Victory of Guernica). There is also a short film from 1950 by Alain Resnais entitled Guernica.



Ranger 4

Ranger 4 was a spacecraft of the Ranger program designed to transmit pictures of the lunar surface to Earth stations during a period of 10 minutes of flight prior to crashing upon the Moon, to rough-land a seismometer capsule on the Moon, to collect gamma-ray data in flight, to study radar reflectivity of the lunar surface, and to continue testing of the Ranger program for development of lunar and interplanetary spacecraft. An onboard computer failure caused failure of the deployment of the solar panels and navigation systems; as a result the spacecraft crashed on the far side of the Moon without returning any scientific data. It was the first U.S. spacecraft to reach another celestial body.

[Duke of Buckingham]

June 22

Controversy over heliocentrism

Biblical references Psalm 93:1, 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30 include text stating that "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." In the same manner, Psalm 104:5 says, "the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved." Further, Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "And the sun rises and sets and returns to its place."

In September 1632, Galileo was ordered to come to Rome to stand trial. He finally arrived in February 1633 and was brought before inquisitor Vincenzo Maculani to be charged. Throughout his trial Galileo steadfastly maintained that since 1616 he had faithfully kept his promise not to hold any of the condemned opinions, and initially he denied even defending them. However, he was eventually persuaded to admit that, contrary to his true intention, a reader of his Dialogue could well have obtained the impression that it was intended to be a defence of Copernicanism. In view of Galileo's rather implausible denial that he had ever held Copernican ideas after 1616 or ever intended to defend them in the Dialogue, his final interrogation, in July 1633, concluded with his being threatened with torture if he did not tell the truth, but he maintained his denial despite the threat. The sentence of the Inquisition was delivered on June 22. It was in three essential parts:

Galileo was found "vehemently suspect of heresy", namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to "abjure, curse and detest" those opinions.
He was sentenced to formal imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition.[60] On the following day this was commuted to house arrest, which he remained under for the rest of his life.
His offending Dialogue was banned; and in an action not announced at the trial, publication of any of his works was forbidden, including any he might write in the future.

Tomb of Galileo Galilei, Santa Croce

According to popular legend, after recanting his theory that the Earth moved around the Sun, Galileo allegedly muttered the rebellious phrase And yet it moves, but there is no evidence that he actually said this or anything similar. The first account of the legend dates to a century after his death.

[Duke of Buckingham]

June 23

1180 – First Battle of Uji, starting the Genpei War in Japan.
1280 – The Battle of Moclín takes place in the context of the Spanish Reconquista pitting the forces of the Kingdom of Castile against the Emirate of Granada. The battle resulted in a Granadian victory.
1305 – A peace treaty between the Flemish and the French is signed at Athis-sur-Orge.
1314 – First War of Scottish Independence: The Battle of Bannockburn (south of Stirling) begins.
1532 – Henry VIII and François I sign a secret treaty against Emperor Charles V.
1565 – Turgut Reis (Dragut), commander of the Ottoman navy, dies during the Siege of Malta.
1611 – The mutinous crew of Henry Hudson's fourth voyage sets Henry, his son and seven loyal crew members adrift in an open boat in what is now Hudson Bay; they are never heard from again.
1661 – Marriage contract between Charles II of England and Catherine of Braganza.
1683 – William Penn signs a friendship treaty with Lenni Lenape Indians in Pennsylvania.
1713 – The French residents of Acadia are given one year to declare allegiance to Britain or leave Nova Scotia, Canada.
1757 – Battle of Plassey – 3,000 British troops under Robert Clive defeat a 50,000 strong Indian army under Siraj Ud Daulah at Plassey.
1758 – Seven Years' War: Battle of Krefeld – British forces defeat French troops at Krefeld in Germany.
1760 – Seven Years' War: Battle of Landeshut – Austria defeats Prussia.
1780 – American Revolution: Battle of Springfield fought in and around Springfield, New Jersey (including Short Hills, formerly of Springfield, now of Millburn Township).
1794 – Empress Catherine II of Russia grants Jews permission to settle in Kiev.
1810 – John Jacob Astor forms the Pacific Fur Company.
1812 – War of 1812: Great Britain revokes the restrictions on American commerce, thus eliminating one of the chief reasons for going to war.
1848 – Beginning of the June Days Uprising in Paris, France.
1860 – The United States Congress establishes the Government Printing Office.
1865 – American Civil War: at Fort Towson in the Oklahoma Territory, Confederate, Brigadier General Stand Watie surrenders the last significant rebel army.
1868 – Typewriter: Christopher Latham Sholes received a patent for an invention he called the "Type-Writer."
1887 – The Rocky Mountains Park Act becomes law in Canada creating the nation's first national park, Banff National Park.
1894 – The International Olympic Committee is founded at the Sorbonne in Paris, at the initiative of Baron Pierre de Coubertin.
1913 – Second Balkan War: The Greeks defeat the Bulgarians in the Battle of Doiran.
1914 – Mexican Revolution: Pancho Villa takes Zacatecas from Victoriano Huerta.
1917 – In a game against the Washington Senators, Boston Red Sox pitcher Ernie Shore retires 26 batters in a row after replacing Babe Ruth, who had been ejected for punching the umpire.
1919 – Estonian War of Independence: the decisive defeat of the Baltische Landeswehr in the Battle of Cesis. This day is celebrated as Victory Day in Estonia.
1926 – The College Board administers the first SAT exam.
1931 – Wiley Post and Harold Gatty take off from Roosevelt Field, Long Island in an attempt to circumnavigate the world in a single-engine plane.
1938 – The Civil Aeronautics Act is signed into law, forming the Civil Aeronautics Authority in the United States.
1940 – World War II: German leader Adolf Hitler surveys newly defeated Paris in now occupied France.
1941 – The Lithuanian Activist Front declares independence from the Soviet Union and forms the Provisional Government of Lithuania; it lasts only briefly as the Nazis will occupy Lithuania a few weeks later.
1942 – World War II: the first selections for the gas chamber at Auschwitz take place on a train full of Jews from Paris.
1942 – World War II: Germany's latest fighter, a Focke-Wulf Fw 190, is captured intact when it mistakenly lands at RAF Pembrey in Wales.
1943 – World War II: The British destroyers HMS Eclipse and HMS Laforey sink the Italian submarine Ascianghi in the Mediterranean after she torpedoes the cruiser HMS Newfoundland.
1946 – The 1946 Vancouver Island earthquake strikes Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.
1946 – The National Democratic Front wins a landslide victory in the municipal elections in French India.
1947 – The United States Senate follows the United States House of Representatives in overriding U.S. President Harry Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act.
1956 – The French National Assembly takes the first step in creating the French Community by passing the Loi Cadre, transferring a number of powers from Paris to elected territorial governments in French West Africa.
1958 – The Dutch Reformed Church accepts women ministers.
1959 – Convicted Manhattan Project spy Klaus Fuchs is released after only nine years in prison and allowed to emigrate to Dresden, East Germany where he resumes a scientific career.
1959 – A fire in a resort hotel in Stalheim (Norway) kills 34 people.
1960 – The United States Food and Drug Administration declares Enovid to be the first officially approved combined oral contraceptive pill in the world.
1961 – Cold War: the Antarctic Treaty, which sets aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve and bans military activity on the continent, comes into force after the opening date for signature set for the December 1, 1959.
1967 – Cold War: U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey for the three-day Glassboro Summit Conference.
1968 – 74 are killed and 150 injured in a football stampede towards a closed exit in a Buenos Aires stadium.
1969 – Warren E. Burger is sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court by retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren.
1972 – Watergate Scandal: U.S. President Richard M. Nixon and White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman are taped talking about using the Central Intelligence Agency to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation's investigation into the Watergate break-ins.
1972 – Title IX of the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964 is amended to prohibit sexual discrimination to any educational program receiving federal funds.
1973 – A fire at a house in Hull, England which kills a six year old boy is passed off as an accident; it later emerges as the first of 26 deaths by fire caused over the next seven years by arsonist Peter Dinsdale.
1982 – Chinese American Vincent Chin dies in a coma after being beaten in Highland Park, Michigan on June 19, by two auto workers who had mistaken him for Japanese and who were angry about the success of Japanese auto companies.
1985 – A terrorist bomb aboard Air India flight 182 brings the Boeing 747 down off the coast of Ireland killing all 329 aboard.
2012 – Ashton Eaton breaks the decathlon world record at the United States Olympic Trials.


Treaty of Athis-sur-Orge

The Treaty of Athis-sur-Orge was a peace treaty signed on June 23, 1305 between King Philip IV of France and Robert III of Flanders. The treaty was signed at Athis-sur-Orge after the Battle of Mons-en-Pévèle and concluded the Franco-Flemish War (1297-1305).

Based on the terms of the treaty, Lilloise Flanders, being the cities of Lille, Douai, and Orchies, were allocated to the French crown. In return, Flanders was allowed to preserve its independence as a fief of the kingdom.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Battle of Landeshut (1760)

The Battle of Landeshut was an engagement fought on June 23, 1760 during the Seven Years' War.

A Prussian army of 12,000 men under General Heinrich August de la Motte Fouqué fought an Austrian army of over 28,000 men under General von Loudon and suffered a defeat, with its commander taken prisoner.


Lithuanian Activist Front
Lithuanian Activist Front or LAF (Lithuanian: Lietuvos Aktyvistų Frontas) was a short-lived resistance organization established in 1940 after Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union. The goal of the organization was to liberate Lithuania and re-establish its independence. It planned and executed the June Uprising and established the short-lived Provisional Government of Lithuania. The Government self-disbanded and LAF was banned by Nazi authorities in September 1941. LAF remains rather controversial due to its anti-Semitic and anti-Polish views.


Klaus Fuchs

Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (29 December 1911 – 28 January 1988) was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who in 1950 was convicted of supplying information from the American, British and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after the Second World War. While at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons and later the early models of the hydrogen bomb.

After the Second World War broke out in Europe, he was interned on the Isle of Man, and later in Canada. After he returned to Britain in 1941, he became an assistant to Rudolf Peierls, working on "Tube Alloys" – the British atomic bomb project. He began passing information on the project to the Soviet Union through Ruth Kuczynski, codenamed "Sonia", a German communist and a major in Soviet Military Intelligence who had worked with Richard Sorge's spy ring in the Far East. In 1943, Fuchs and Peierls went to Columbia University, in New York City, to work on the Manhattan Project. In August 1944 Fuchs joined the Theoretical Physics Division at the Los Alamos Laboratory, working under Hans Bethe. His chief area of expertise was the problem of imploding, necessary for the development of the plutonium bomb. After the war he worked at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell as the head of the Theoretical Physics Division.

In January 1950, Fuchs confessed that he was a spy. He was sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment and stripped of his British citizenship. He was released in 1959, after serving nine years and emigrated to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), where he was elected to the Academy of Sciences and the SED central committee. He was later appointed deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf, where he served until he retired in 1979.


Watergate scandal

The Watergate complex is a group of five buildings next to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. in the United States. The 10-acre (40,000 m2) site contains an office building, three apartment buildings, and a hotel-office building. Construction was delayed for several months while the developer, government officials, and others debated the appropriateness of the complex's architectural style and height. Construction began in August 1963, and, after additional controversy over the height and siting of the fifth building, was completed in January 1971. Considered one of Washington's most desirable living spaces, the Watergate has been popular with members of Congress and political appointees in the executive branch since it opened. The complex has been sold several times since the 1980s. In the 1990s it was split up and its component buildings and parts of buildings were sold to various owners.

In 1972, the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, then located on the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel and Office Building, were burglarized, documents were photographed, and telephones were wiretapped. The investigation into the burglary revealed that high officials in the Nixon administration had ordered the break-in and then tried to cover up their involvement. Additional crimes were also uncovered. The ensuing Watergate Scandal, named for the complex, led to the resignation of Nixon on August 9, 1974. The name "Watergate" and the suffix "-gate" have since become synonymous with political scandals in the United States and in other English- and non-English-speaking nations as well.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Battle of Bannockburn

The Battle of Bannockburn (Blàr Allt a' Bhonnaich in Scottish Gaelic) (24 June 1314) was a significant Scottish victory in the Wars of Scottish Independence. It was one of the decisive battles of the First War of Scottish Independence.

The Scottish victory was complete and, although full English recognition of Scottish independence was not achieved until more than ten years later, Robert Bruce's position as king was greatly strengthened by the outcome. However, the fighting resumed in the 1330s during the early reign of King Edward III, with significant English victories at the Battle of Dupplin Moor and the Battle of Halidon Hill.


Lenni Lenape

The Lenape /ləˈnɑːpi/ are Native American people in Canada and the United States. They are also called Delaware Indians after their historic territory along the Delaware River. As a result of disruption following the American Revolutionary War and later Indian removals from the eastern United States, the main groups now live in Ontario (Canada), Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. In Canada, they are enrolled in the Munsee-Delaware Nation 1, the Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and the Delaware of Six Nations. In the United States, they are enrolled in three federally recognized tribes, that is, the Delaware Nation and the Delaware Tribe of Indians, both located in Oklahoma, and the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, located in Wisconsin. In Delaware, they are organized and state-recognized as the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware. The Ramapough Mountain Indians and the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape identify as Lenape descendants and are recognized as tribes by the state of New Jersey.

At the time of European contact in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Lenape inhabited a region on the mid-Atlantic coast in what anthropologists call the Northeastern Woodlands.[citation needed] Although never politically unified, It roughly comprised the area around and between the Delaware and lower Hudson rivers, and included the western part of Long Island in present-day New York. Some of their place names, such as Manhattan, Raritan, and Tappan were adopted by Dutch and English colonists to identify them. Based on the historical record of the mid-seventeenth century, it has been estimated that most Lenape polities consisted of several hundred people. It is conceivable that some had been considerably larger prior to contact. Even regions at a distance from European settlement, such as Iroquoia in upstate New York and central Pennsylvania, had been devastated by smallpox by the 1640s.

Most modern Lenape are native English speakers. In the seventeenth century, the Lenape spoke three closely related dialects: Unami, Munsee and Unalachtigo, which are collectively known as the Delaware languages. They have been classified by linguists as belonging to the Eastern Algonquian language group. The term "Algonquian" is occasionally used as a label for people who spoke languages of this group, but the distinct peoples in this large language family had otherwise little in common. Due to aggressive European expansion and the resulting migrations, population losses, and political reorganization, Lenape languages had converged by the mid-eighteenth century. Unami and Munsee were now the most dominant. Another hundred years of forced migrations left the languages vulnerable. They hardly survived the U.S. Indian policies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Various people made efforts to revive or at least document Unami and Munsee in the late twentieth century.

The Lenape kinship system was traditionally organized by clans determined by matrilineal descent. That is, children were considered to belong to the mother's clan, where they gained their social status and identity. The mother's eldest brother was more significant as a mentor to the boy children than was their father, who was of another clan. Hereditary leadership passed through the maternal line, and women elders could remove leaders of whom they disapproved. Traditionally, the Lenape had no concept of landed property. But clans had use rights. Agricultural land was managed by women and allotted according to the subsistence needs of their extended families. Matrilocal residence further enhanced the position of women in society. A young married couple would live with the woman's family, where her mother and sisters could also assist her with her growing family.

At the time of European contact, the Lenape practiced agriculture, mostly companion planting. The women cultivated many varieties of the "Three Sisters:" corn, beans and squash. The men also practiced hunting and the harvesting of seafood. The people were primarily sedentary rather than nomadic; they moved to seasonal campsites for particular purposes such as fishing and hunting. European settlers and traders from the seventeenth-century colonies of New Netherland and New Sweden traded with the Lenape for agricultural products, mainly maize, in exchange for iron tools. Lenapes also arranged contacts between Minquas or Northern Iroquoians and the Dutch and Swedish West India companies to promote the fur trade. The Lenape were major producers of wampum or shell beads, which they traditionally used for ritual purposes and as ornaments. After the Dutch arrival, they began to exchange wampum for beaver furs provided by Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannock and other Minquas. They exchanged these furs for Dutch and, from the late 1630s, also Swedish imports. Relations between some Lenape and Minqua polities briefly turned sore in the late 1620s and early 1630s, but were relatively peaceful most of the time.

Most Lenape were pushed out of their homeland by expanding European colonies during the eighteenth century. Lenape polities were weakened by newly introduced diseases, mainly smallpox, and European violence. Iroquoian polities occasionally contributed to the process. The surviving Lenape reorganized their polities and moved west into the upper Ohio River basin. The American Revolutionary War and U.S. independence pushed them further west. In the 1860s, the United States government sent most Lenape remaining in the eastern United States to the Oklahoma Territory under Indian removal policy. In the 21st century, most Lenape now reside in the U.S. state of Oklahoma, with some communities living also in Kansas, Wisconsin, Ontario (Canada), and in their traditional homelands.

[Duke of Buckingham]

June 24

109 – Roman emperor Trajan inaugurates the Aqua Traiana, an aqueduct that channels water from Lake Bracciano, 40 kilometres (25 miles) north-west of Rome.
474 – Julius Nepos forces Roman usurper Glycerius to abdicate the throne and proclaims himself Emperor of the Western Roman Empire.
637 – The Battle of Moira is fought between the High King of Ireland and the Kings of Ulster and Dalriada. It is claimed to be largest battle in the history of Ireland.
972 – Battle of Cedynia, the first documented victory of Polish forces, takes place.
1128 – Battle of São Mamede, near Guimarães: forces led by Alfonso I defeat forces led by his mother Teresa of León and her lover Fernando Pérez de Traba. After this battle, the future king calls himself "Prince of Portugal", the first step towards "official independence" that will be reached in 1139 after the Battle of Ourique.
1230 – The Siege of Jaén started in the context of the Spanish Reconquista.
1314 – First War of Scottish Independence: the Battle of Bannockburn concludes with a decisive victory by Scottish forces led by Robert the Bruce, though England did not recognize Scottish independence until 1328 with the signing of the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton.
1340 – Hundred Years' War: Battle of Sluys – The French fleet is almost destroyed by the English Fleet commanded in person by King Edward III.
1374 – A sudden outbreak of St. John's Dance causes people in the streets of Aachen, Germany, to experience hallucinations and begin to jump and twitch uncontrollably until they collapse from exhaustion.
1497 – John Cabot lands in North America at Newfoundland leading the first European exploration of the region since the Vikings.
1509 – Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon are crowned King and Queen of England.
1535 – The Anabaptist state of Münster is conquered and disbanded.
1571 – Miguel Lopez de Legazpi founds Manila, the capital of the Republic of the Philippines.
1597 – The first Dutch voyage to the East Indies reaches Bantam (on Java).
1604 – Samuel de Champlain discovers the mouth of the Saint John River, site of Reversing Falls and the present day city of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.
1622 – Battle of Macau: The Dutch attempt but fail to capture Macau.
1717 – The Premier Grand Lodge of England, the first Masonic Grand Lodge in the world (now the United Grand Lodge of England), is founded in London, England.
1779 – American Revolutionary War: The Great Siege of Gibraltar begins.
1793 – The first Republican constitution in France is adopted.
1812 – Napoleonic Wars: Napoleon's Grande Armée crosses the Neman River beginning the invasion of Russia.
1813 – Battle of Beaver Dams: a British and Indian combined force defeats the United States Army.
1821 – The Battle of Carabobo takes place. It is the decisive battle in the war of independence of Venezuela from Spain.
1846 – The saxophone is patented by Adolphe Sax in Paris, France.
1859 – Battle of Solferino (Battle of the Three Sovereigns): Sardinia and France defeat Austria in Solferino, northern Italy.
1866 – Battle of Custoza: an Austrian army defeats the Italian army during the Austro-Prussian War.
1880 – First performance of O Canada, the song that would become the national anthem of Canada, at the Congrès national des Canadiens-Français.
1894 – Marie Francois Sadi Carnot is assassinated by Sante Geronimo Caserio.
1902 – King Edward VII of the United Kingdom develops appendicitis, delaying his coronation.
1913 – Greece and Serbia annul their alliance with Bulgaria.
1916 – Mary Pickford becomes the first female film star to sign a million dollar contract.
1916 – World War I: the Battle of the Somme begins with a week-long artillery bombardment on the German Line.
1918 – First airmail service in Canada from Montreal to Toronto.
1932 – A bloodless Revolution instigated by the People's Party ends the absolute power of King Prajadhipok of Siam (now Thailand).
1938 – Pieces of a meteor, estimated to have weighed 450 metric tons when it hit the Earth's atmosphere and exploded, land near Chicora, Pennsylvania.
1939 – Siam is renamed Thailand by Plaek Pibulsonggram, the country's third prime minister.
1947 – Kenneth Arnold makes the first widely reported UFO sighting near Mount Rainier, Washington.
1948 – Start of the Berlin Blockade: the Soviet Union makes overland travel between West Germany and West Berlin impossible.
1949 – The first television western, Hopalong Cassidy, is aired on NBC starring William Boyd.
1957 – In Roth v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment.
1963 – The United Kingdom grants Zanzibar internal self-government.
1967 – The worst caving disaster in British history takes 6 lives at Mossdale Caverns
1981 – The Humber Bridge is opened to traffic, connecting Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. It would be the world's longest single-span suspension bridge for 17 years.
1982 – "The Jakarta Incident": British Airways Flight 9 flies into a cloud of volcanic ash thrown up by the eruption of Mount Galunggung, resulting in the failure of all four engines.
1985 – STS-51-G Space Shuttle Discovery completes its mission, best remembered for having Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the first Arab and first Muslim in space, as a Payload Specialist.
2002 – The Igandu train disaster in Tanzania kills 281, the worst train accident in African history.
2004 – In New York, capital punishment is declared unconstitutional.
2010 – John Isner of the United States defeats Nicolas Mahut of France at Wimbledon, in the longest match in professional tennis history.
2012 – The last known individual of Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii, a subspecies of the Galápagos tortoise, dies.


Aqua Traiana

The Aqua Traiana (later rebuilt and named the Acqua Paola) was a 1st-century Roman aqueduct built by Emperor Trajan and inaugurated on 24 June 109 AD. It channelled water from sources around Lake Bracciano, 40 kilometers (25 mi) north-west of Rome, to Rome in ancient Roman times but had fallen into disuse by the 17th century. It fed water mills arranged in a parallel sequence at the Janiculum, under the present American Academy in Rome. The milling complex had a long history, and were famously put out of action by the Ostrogoths when they cut the aqueduct in 537 during the first siege of Rome. Belisarius restored the supply of grain by using mills floating in the Tiber. The complex of mills bears parallels with a similar complex at Barbegal in southern Gaul.


Battle of São Mamede

The Battle of São Mamede (Portuguese: Batalha de São Mamede, pronounced: [ˈsɐ̃w̃ mɐˈmɛð(ɨ)]) took place on 24 June, 1128 near Guimarães and is considered the seminal event for the foundation of the Kingdom of Portugal. Portuguese forces led by Afonso Henriques defeated forces led by his mother Teresa of Portugal and her lover Fernão Peres de Trava. Following São Mamede, the future king styled himself "Prince of Portugal". He would be called "King of Portugal" in 1139 and was recognised as such by neighbouring kingdoms in 1143.

The counts that dominated the counties of Portugal and Coimbra kept the idea of independence, and their merger strengthened their positions. Alfonso VI of León, knowing the wishes of the Portuguese, united all Galicia under a single rule of one lord, which he choose from one of his close relatives. Teresa, mother of Afonso Henriques, came to Guimarães to govern the Portuguese county. The Portuguese did not accept this, and the battle started. Afonso won the battle and Portugal started its journey towards independence. In 1129, he declared himself Prince of Portugal and in 1139 as King of Portugal. León finally recognized Portugal's independence in 1143 in the Treaty of Zamora. In 1179, the Holy See declared him King, de jure.


Pinta Island tortoise

The Pinta Island tortoise (Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii), also known as the Pinta giant tortoise, Abingdon Island tortoise, or Abingdon Island giant tortoise, was a subspecies of Galápagos tortoise native to Ecuador's Pinta Island.

The subspecies was described by Albert Günther in 1877 after specimens arrived in London. By the end of the 19th century, most of the Pinta Island tortoises had been wiped out due to hunting. By the mid-20th century, it was assumed that the subspecies was extinct[citation needed] until a single male was discovered on the island in 1971. Efforts were made to mate the male, named Lonesome George, with other subspecies, but no viable eggs were produced. Lonesome George died on 24 June 2012 and the subspecies was believed to have become extinct with the death of Lonesome George. However, 17 first-generation hybrids have been found at Wolf Volcano on Isabela Island during a recent trip by Yale University researchers. As these specimens are juveniles, their parents may still be alive.

[Duke of Buckingham]

June 25

253 – Pope Cornelius is executed (beheaded) at Centumcellae.
524 – The Franks are defeated by the Burgundians in the Battle of Vézeronce.
841 – In the Battle of Fontenay-en-Puisaye, forces led by Charles the Bald and Louis the German defeat the armies of Lothair I of Italy and Pepin II of Aquitaine.
1530 – At the Diet of Augsburg the Augsburg Confession is presented to the Holy Roman Emperor by the Lutheran princes and Electors of Germany.
1658 – Spanish forces fail to retake Jamaica at the Battle of Rio Nuevo during the Anglo-Spanish War.
1678 – Venetian Elena Cornaro Piscopia is the first woman awarded a doctorate of philosophy when she graduates from the University of Padua.
1741 – Maria Theresa of Austria is crowned Queen of Hungary.
1786 – Gavriil Pribylov discovers St. George Island of the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea.
1788 – Virginia becomes the 10th state to ratify the United States Constitution.
1876 – Battle of the Little Bighorn and the death of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.
1900 – The Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu discovers the Dunhuang manuscripts, a cache of ancient texts that are of great historical and religious significance, in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China.
1906 – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania millionaire Harry Thaw shoots and kills prominent architect Stanford White.
1910 – The United States Congress passes the Mann Act, which prohibits interstate transport of females for “immoral purposes”; the ambiguous language would be used to selectively prosecute people for years to come.
1910 – Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Firebird is premiered in Paris, bringing him to prominence as a composer.
1913 – American Civil War veterans begin arriving at the Great Reunion of 1913.
1935 – Diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Colombia are established.
1938 – Dr. Douglas Hyde is inaugurated as the first President of Ireland.
1940 – World War II: France officially surrenders to Germany at 01:35.
1943 – The Holocaust: Jews in the Częstochowa Ghetto in Poland stage an uprising against the Nazis.
1944 – World War II: The Battle of Tali-Ihantala, the largest battle ever fought in the Nordic Countries, begins.
1944 – World War II: United States Navy and Royal Navy ships bombard Cherbourg to support United States Army units engaged in the Battle of Cherbourg.
1944 – The final page of the comic Krazy Kat was published, exactly two months after its author George Herriman died.
1947 – The Diary of a Young Girl (better known as The Diary of Anne Frank) is published.
1948 – The Berlin airlift begins.
1949 – Long-Haired Hare, starring Bugs Bunny, is released in theaters.
1950 – The Korean War begins with the invasion of South Korea by North Korea.
1960 – Two cryptographers working for the United States National Security Agency left for vacation to Mexico, and from there defected to the Soviet Union.
1967 – Broadcasting of the first live global satellite television program: Our World
1975 – The State of Emergency is declared in India.
1975 – Mozambique achieves independence.
1976 – Missouri Governor Kit Bond issues an executive order rescinding the Extermination Order, formally apologizing on behalf of the state of Missouri for the suffering it had caused to the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
1978 – The rainbow flag representing gay pride is flown for the first time in the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade.
1981 – Microsoft is restructured to become an incorporated business in its home state of Washington.
1982 – Greece abolishes the head shaving of recruits in the military.
1991 – Croatia and Slovenia declare their independence from Yugoslavia.
1993 – Kim Campbell is chosen as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and becomes the first female Prime Minister of Canada.
1996 – The Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia kills 19 U.S. servicemen.
1997 – An unmanned Progress spacecraft collides with the Russian space station Mir.
1997 – The Soufrière Hills volcano in Montserrat erupts resulting in the death of 19 people.
1998 – In Clinton v. City of New York, the United States Supreme Court decides that the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 is unconstitutional.
2006 – Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier, is kidnapped by Palestinian militants in a cross-border raid from the Israeli territory.
2009 – Domenic Johansson, a Indian-Swedish boy, is forcibly removed by Swedish authorities from the care of his parents, raising human rights issues surrounding the rights of parents and children in Sweden.
2012 – The final steel beam of 4 World Trade Center is lifted into place in a ceremony.


Battle of the Little Bighorn

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was an armed engagement between combined forces of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, against the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army. The battle, which occurred on June 25 and 26, 1876 near the Little Bighorn River in eastern Montana Territory, was the most prominent action of the Great Sioux War of 1876. It was an overwhelming victory for the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho, led by several major war leaders, including Crazy Horse and Chief Gall, inspired by the visions of Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake). The U.S. Seventh Cavalry, including the Custer Battalion, a force of 700 men led by George Armstrong Custer, suffered a severe defeat. Five of the Seventh Cavalry's companies were annihilated; Custer was killed, as were two of his brothers, a nephew, and a brother-in-law. The total U.S. casualty count, including scouts, was 268 dead and 55 injured.

Public response to the Great Sioux War varied at the time. The battle, and Custer's actions in particular, have been studied extensively by historians.


Dunhuang manuscripts

The Dunhuang manuscripts are a cache of important religious and secular documents discovered in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China in the early 20th century. Dating from the 5th to early 11th centuries, the manuscripts include works ranging from history and mathematics to folk songs and dance. Most of the religious manuscripts are Buddhist, and other religions including Daoism, Nestorianism and Manichaeism are also represented. The majority of the manuscripts are in the Chinese and Tibetan languages. Other languages represented are Khotanese, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Tangut and Uyghur. The manuscripts are a major resource for academic studies in a wide variety of fields including history, religious studies, linguistics, and manuscript studies.


Progress (spacecraft)

The Progress (Russian: Прогресс) is a Russian expendable freighter spacecraft. The spacecraft is an unmanned resupply spacecraft during its flight but upon docking with a space station, it allows astronauts inside, hence it is classified manned by the manufacturer. It was derived from the Soyuz spacecraft, and is launched with the Soyuz rocket. It is currently used to supply the International Space Station, but was originally used to supply Soviet space stations for many years. There are three to four flights of the Progress spacecraft to the ISS per year. Each spacecraft remains docked until shortly before the new one, or a Soyuz (which uses the same docking ports) arrives. Then it is filled with waste, disconnected, deorbited, and destroyed in the atmosphere. Because of the different Progress variants used for ISS, NASA uses its own nomenclature where "ISS 1P" means the first Progress spacecraft to ISS.

It has carried fuel and other supplies to all the space stations since Salyut 6. The idea for the Progress came from the realisation that in order for long duration space missions to be possible, there would have to be a constant source of supplies. It had been determined that a cosmonaut needed consumables (water, air, food, etc.) plus there was a need for maintenance items and payloads for experiments. It was impractical to launch this along with passengers in the small space available in the Soyuz.


Soufrière Hills

The Soufrière Hills volcano (soufrière is a French word meaning "sulphur outlet") is an active, complex stratovolcano (with many lava domes forming its summit) on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. After a long period of dormancy, the Soufrière Hills volcano became active in 1995, and has continued to erupt ever since. Its eruptions have rendered more than half of Montserrat uninhabitable, destroying the capital city, Plymouth, and causing widespread evacuations: about two thirds of the population left the island.

The volcano is andesitic in nature and the current pattern of activity includes periods of dome growth, punctuated by brief episodes of dome collapse which result in pyroclastic flows, ash venting, and explosive eruption. The volcano is monitored by the Montserrat Volcano Observatory.

[Duke of Buckingham]

June 26

221 – Roman Emperor Elagabalus adopts his cousin Alexander Severus as his heir and receives the title of Caesar.
363 – Roman Emperor Julian is killed during the retreat from the Sassanid Empire. General Jovian is proclaimed Emperor by the troops on the battlefield.
699 – En no Ozuno, a Japanese mystic and apothecary who will later be regarded as the founder of a folk religion Shugendō, is banished to Izu Ōshima.
1409 – Western Schism: the Roman Catholic church is led into a double schism as Petros Philargos is crowned Pope Alexander V after the Council of Pisa, joining Pope Gregory XII in Rome and Pope Benedict XII in Avignon.
1541 – Francisco Pizarro is assassinated in Lima by the son of his former companion and later antagonist, Diego Almagro the younger. Almagro is later caught and executed.
1718 – Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich of Russia, Peter the Great's son, mysteriously dies after being sentenced to death by his father for plotting against him.
1723 – After a siege and bombardment by cannon, Baku surrenders to the Russians.
1740 – A combined force Spanish, free blacks and allied Indians defeat a British garrison at the Siege of Fort Mose near St. Augustine during the War of Jenkins' Ear.
1848 – End of the June Days Uprising in Paris.
1857 – The first investiture of the Victoria Cross in Hyde Park, London.
1870 – The Christian holiday of Christmas is declared a federal holiday in the United States.
1886 – Henri Moissan isolated elemental Fluorine for the first time.
1906 – 1906 French Grand Prix, the first Grand Prix motor racing event held
1907 – The 1907 Tiflis bank robbery took place in Yerevan Square, now Freedom Square, Tbilisi.
1909 – The Science Museum in London comes into existence as an independent entity.
1917 – The first U.S. troops arrive in France to fight alongside Britain and France against Germany in World War I.
1918 – World War I, Western Front: Battle for Belleau Wood – Allied Forces under John J. Pershing and James Harbord defeat Imperial German Forces under Wilhelm, German Crown Prince.
1924 – American occupying forces leave the Dominican Republic.
1927 – The Cyclone roller coaster opens on Coney Island.
1934 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Federal Credit Union Act, which establishes credit unions.
1936 – Initial flight of the Focke-Wulf Fw 61, the first practical helicopter.
1940 – World War II: under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union presents an ultimatum to Romania requiring it to cede Bessarabia and the northern part of Bukovina.
1941 – World War II: Soviet planes bomb Kassa, Hungary (now Košice, Slovakia), giving Hungary the impetus to declare war the next day.
1942 – The first flight of the Grumman F6F Hellcat.
1944 – World War II: The Battle of Osuchy in Osuchy, Poland, ends with the defeat of the Polish resistance forces.
1945 – The United Nations Charter is signed in San Francisco.
1948 – The Western allies begin an airlift to Berlin after the Soviet Union blockades West Berlin.
1948 – William Shockley files the original patent for the grown junction transistor, the first bipolar junction transistor.
1948 – Shirley Jackson's short story The Lottery is published in The New Yorker magazine.
1952 – The Pan-Malayan Labour Party is founded in Malaya, as a union of statewise labour parties.
1953 – Lavrentiy Beria,head of MVD, is arrested by Nikita Khrushchev and other members of the Politburo.
1955 – The South African Congress Alliance adopts the Freedom Charter at the Congress of the People in Kliptown.
1959 – The Saint Lawrence Seaway opens, opening North America's Great Lakes to ocean-going ships.
1960 – The former British Protectorate of British Somaliland gains its independence as Somaliland.
1960 – Madagascar gains its independence from France.
1963 – U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, underlining the support of the United States for democratic West Germany shortly after Soviet-supported East Germany erected the Berlin Wall.
1973 – At Plesetsk Cosmodrome 9 people are killed in an explosion of a Cosmos 3-M rocket.
1974 – The Universal Product Code is scanned for the first time to sell a package of Wrigley's chewing gum at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio
1975 – The State of Emergency is declared in India.
1975 – Two FBI agents and a member of the American Indian Movement are killed in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota; Leonard Peltier is later convicted of the murders in a controversial trial.
1977 – The Yorkshire Ripper kills 16 year old shop assistant Jayne MacDonald in Leeds, changing public perception of the killer as she is the first victim who is not a prostitute.
1978 – Air Canada Flight 189 to Toronto overruns the runway and crashes into the Etobicoke Creek ravine. Two of 107 passengers on board perish.
1991 – Ten-Day War: the Yugoslav people's army begins the Ten-Day War in Slovenia.
1995 – Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani deposes his father Khalifa bin Hamad al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, in a bloodless coup.
1996 – Irish Journalist Veronica Guerin is shot in her car while in traffic in the outskirts of Dublin
1997 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the Communications Decency Act violates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
2003 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Lawrence v. Texas that gender-based sodomy laws are unconstitutional.
2006 – Mari Alkatiri, the first Prime Minister of East Timor, resigns after weeks of political unrest.
2012 – The Waldo Canyon Fire descends into the Mountain Shadows neighborhood in Colorado Springs burning 347 homes in a matter of hours and killing two people.


En no Gyōja

En no Ozunu (役小角?, also pronounced Ozuno or Otsuno (male; b. conventionally given as 634, in Katsuragi; d. approx. 700-707, reported details vary). His kabane, or political standing of his clan, was Kimi (君)) was a Japanese ascetic, mystic, and apothecary, who was banished to Izu Ōshima on June 26, 699 AD. In folk religion, he is often called En no Gyōja (役行者?, lit. "the Ascetic from the En clan") and traditionally held to be the founder of Shugendō, a syncretic religion incorporating aspects of Taoism, Shinto, esoteric Buddhism (especially Shingon Mikkyō and the Tendai sect) and traditional Japanese shamanism.


Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the Nazi German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, officially the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and also known as the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact or Nazi–Soviet Pact, was a non-aggression pact signed in Moscow in the late hours of 23 August 1939.

The Pact ensured a non-involvement of the Soviet Union in a European War, as well as separating Germany and Japan from forming a military alliance, thus allowing Stalin to concentrate on Japan in the battles of Khalkhin Gol (Nomonhan). The pact remained in effect until 22 June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

In addition to stipulations of non-aggression, the treaty included a secret protocol that divided territories of Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland into Nazi and Soviet "spheres of influence", anticipating potential "territorial and political rearrangements" of these countries. Thereafter, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The Soviet Union would not invade Poland until the Nomonhan incident was officially concluded by the Molotov–Togo agreement, which it was on 15 September 1939, taking effect on 16 September, at which time Stalin ordered Soviet forces to invade Poland on 17 September 1939. Part of southeastern (Karelia) and Salla region in Finland were annexed by the Soviet Union after the Winter War. This was followed by Soviet annexations of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertza region.

Of the territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1940, the region around Bialystok and a minor part of Galicia east of the San river around Przemyśl were the only ones returned to the Polish state at the end of World War II. Of all other territories annexed by the USSR in 1939–40, the ones detached from Finland (Karelia, Petsamo), Estonia (Ingrian area and Petseri County) and Latvia (Abrene) remained part of the Russian Federation, the successor state of the Soviet Union, after 1991. Nothern Bukovina, Southern Bessarabia and Hertza remain part of Ukraine.


Ten-Day War

The Ten-Day War (Slovene: desetdnevna vojna) or the Slovenian Independence War (slovenska osamosvojitvena vojna), also the Weekend War (vikend-vojna) was a civil war in Yugoslavia that followed the Slovenian declaration of independence on 25 June 1991. It was fought between the Slovenian Territorial Defence (Slovene: Teritorialna obramba Republike Slovenije) and the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) in 1991, after Slovenia declared its independence. It lasted from 27 June 1991 until 7 July 1991, when the Brijuni Accords were signed.

[MarionWilliamson]

Nov 3, 1777:
Washington learns of Conway cabal

On this day in 1777, General George Washington is informed that a conspiracy is afoot to discredit him with Congress and have him replaced by General Horatio Gates. Thomas Conway, who would be made inspector general of the United States less than two months later on December 14, led the effort.

Conway, who was born in Ireland but raised in France, entered the French army in 1749. He was recruited to the Patriot cause by Silas Deane, the American ambassador to France, and after meeting with Washington at Morristown in May 1777, he was appointed brigadier general and assigned to Major General John Sullivan's division.

Conway served admirably under Sullivan at the battles of Brandywine, in September 1777, and Germantown, in October 1777, before becoming involved in an unconfirmed conspiracy to remove General Washington from command of the Continental Army. The rumored conspiracy would go down in history as the "Conway cabal."

After the Continental Army suffered several defeats in the fall of 1777, some members of Congress expressed displeasure with Washington's leadership and Conway began writing letters to prominent leaders, including General Horatio Gates, that were critical of Washington. After Washington got wind of Conway's letter to General Gates, he responded with a letter to Congress in January 1778. Embarrassed, Conway offered his resignation in March 1778 by way of apology, and was surprised and humiliated when Congress accepted. After General John Cadwalader wounded him in a duel defending Washington's honor, Conway returned to France, where he died in exile in 1800.

French-Irish General Thomas Conway, for whom the controversy was named


Nov 3, 1984:
A serial killer abducts and rapes his teenage victim

Bobby Joe Long kidnaps and rapes 17-year-old Lisa McVey in Tampa, Florida. The victim's subsequent courage and bravery led to the capture and arrest of Long, who was eventually found guilty of 10 murders committed in the Tampa area during the early 1980s.

McVey had been riding her bicycle home from work in the evening when she was abducted and blindfolded by Long. He then smuggled her into an apartment where he sexually assaulted her for more than a day. While successfully convincing Long to spare her life, McVey remained mentally alert enough throughout the brutal ordeal to remember certain details that were crucial in helping police capture her attacker.

By estimating the amount of time she spent in Long's car after being abducted, McVey was able to help establish a radius for his location. She also was able to estimate the time of day that Long had used an ATM by recalling the television show music she heard playing faintly in the background. Since ATM's were still relatively rare in 1984, police were able to narrow possible culprits by checking out everyone who had conducted an ATM transaction in that time frame and area. Lastly, the victim had seen enough of Long's car to provide details that helped identify its year and model.

With this critical information, police were able to locate and arrest Long on November 16. After confessing to 10 area homicides, he received a string of 99-year prison terms and two death penalty sentences, although the latter were eventually overturned because he had been interrogated despite his requests to speak to a lawyer.



Nov 3, 1903:
Panama declares independence

With the support of the U.S. government, Panama issues a declaration of independence from Colombia. The revolution was engineered by a Panamanian faction backed by the Panama Canal Company, a French-U.S. corporation that hoped to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with a waterway across the Isthmus of Panama.

In 1903, the Hay-Herrán Treaty was signed with Colombia, granting the United States use of the Isthmus of Panama in exchange for financial compensation. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty, but the Colombian Senate, fearing a loss of sovereignty, refused. In response, President Theodore Roosevelt gave tacit approval to a rebellion by Panamanian nationalists, which began on November 3, 1903. To aid the rebels, the U.S.-administered railroad in Panama removed its trains from the northern terminus of Colón, thus stranding Colombian troops sent to crush the insurrection. Other Colombian forces were discouraged from marching on Panama by the arrival of the U.S. warship Nashville.

On November 6, the United States recognized the Republic of Panama, and on November 18 the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty was signed with Panama, granting the United States exclusive and permanent possession of the Panama Canal Zone. In exchange, Panama received $10 million and an annuity of $250,000 beginning nine years later. The treaty was negotiated by U.S. Secretary of State John Hay and the owner of the Panama Canal Company. Almost immediately, the treaty was condemned by many Panamanians as an infringement on their country's new national sovereignty.

On August 15, 1914, the Panama Canal was inaugurated with the passage of the U.S. vessel Ancon, a cargo and passenger ship. After decades of protest and negotiations, the Panama Canal passed to Panamanian control in December 1999.



Nov 3, 1957:
The Soviet space dog

The Soviet Union launches the first animal into space—a dog name Laika—aboard the Sputnik 2 spacecraft.

Laika, part Siberian husky, lived as a stray on the Moscow streets before being enlisted into the Soviet space program. Laika survived for several days as a passenger in the USSR's second artificial Earth satellite, kept alive by a sophisticated life-support system. Electrodes attached to her body provided scientists on the ground with important information about the biological effects of space travel. She died after the batteries of her life-support system ran down.

At least a dozen more Russian dogs were launched into space in preparation for the first manned Soviet space mission, and at least five of these dogs died in flight. On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space, aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1. He orbited Earth once before landing safely in the USSR.



Nov 3, 1962:
The Crystals earn a #1 hit with "He's A Rebel"—or do they?

In an incident familiar to all fans of pop music scandals, a great hue and cry was raised in the press and in the music industry when the late 1980s dance sensation Milli Vanilli was exposed as mere lip-sync artists. Suddenly exposed as illegitimate, the duo that had earned a #1 hit with "Baby Don't Forget My Number" (1989) was immediately stripped of its Grammy Award for Best New Artist. But fans of pop music hypocrisy know that the music industry's definitions of "legitimate" and "illegitimate" have always been flexible, and that Milli Vanilli was hardly the first chart-topping act with a scandalous secret. Another such act scored a #1 hit on this day in 1962, in fact, when their name appeared at the top the Billboard Hot 100 alongside the song "He's A Rebel"—a record on which the credited artists, the Crystals, had not sung a single note.

Formed in Brooklyn by five high school classmates, the Crystals were a legitimate vocal group who managed to secure a contract with the newly formed Philles record label in 1961. Philles was under the creative control of the soon-to-be-legendary producer Phil Spector, who took the Crystals under his wing and helped them record two top 20 hits in "There's No Other" (#20, December 1961) and "Uptown" (#13, May 1962). While their third release—the Gerry Goffin-Carole King-penned "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)"—flopped when radio stations rejected it over subject-matter concerns, the next single released under their name would go all the way to #1.

Although few people knew it at the time, however, rightful credit for that record belongs to a group called the Blossoms, whose lead singer, Darlene Love, would earn two minor top 40 hits of her own in 1963 with "(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry" and "Wait Til' My Bobby Gets Home," but who would receive none of the credit for "He's A Rebel." With the Crystals back in New York, Phil Spector chose to record "He's A Rebel" with the Blossoms in Los Angeles in order to get the record out ahead of a competing version by Vicki Carr. Since the Blossoms and Darlene Love were complete unknowns, the record was credited to the Crystals

The Crystals would go on to "earn" one more major hit with a song recorded by Darlene Love and the Blossoms: "He's Sure The Boy I Love" (#11, February 1963). They would also earn even bigger hits, however, with songs they actually did record: "Da Doo Ron Ron (When He Walked Me Home)" (#3, June 1963) and "Then He Kissed Me" (#6, September 1963)

It was great achievement for mankind for sure...We need to appreciate from time to time to follow right path of progress and prosperity

[Duke of Buckingham]

June 27

1358 – Republic of Dubrovnik is founded
1497 – Cornish rebels Michael An Gof and Thomas Flamank are executed at Tyburn, London, England.
1743 – War of the Austrian Succession: Battle of Dettingen: On the battlefield in Bavaria, George II personally leads troops into battle. The last time that a British monarch would command troops in the field.
1759 – General James Wolfe begins the siege of Quebec.
1806 – British forces take Buenos Aires during the first British invasions of the Río de la Plata.
1844 – Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, and his brother Hyrum Smith, are murdered by a mob at the Carthage, Illinois jail.
1895 – The inaugural run of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Royal Blue from Washington, D.C., to New York, New York, the first U.S. passenger train to use electric locomotives.
1898 – The first solo circumnavigation of the globe is completed by Joshua Slocum from Briar Island, Nova Scotia.
1899 – A. E. J. Collins scores 628 runs not out, the highest-ever recorded score in cricket.
1905 – Battleship Potemkin uprising: sailors start a mutiny aboard the Battleship Potemkin, denouncing the crimes of autocracy, demanding liberty and an end to war.
1923 – Capt. Lowell H. Smith and Lt. John P. Richter perform the first ever aerial refueling in a DH-4B biplane
1927 – Prime Minister of Japan Tanaka Giichi leads a conference to discuss Japan's plans for China; later, a document detailing these plans, the "Tanaka Memorial" is leaked, although it is now considered a forgery.
1941 – Romanian governmental forces, allies of Nazi Germany, launch one of the most violent pogroms in Jewish history in the city of Iaşi, (Romania), resulting in the murder of at least 13,266 Jews.
1941 – German troops capture the city of Białystok during Operation Barbarossa.
1946 – In the Canadian Citizenship Act, the Parliament of Canada establishes the definition of Canadian citizenship.
1950 – The United States decides to send troops to fight in the Korean War.
1952 – Guatemala passes Decree 900, ordering the redistribution of uncultivated land.
1954 – The world's first nuclear power station opens in Obninsk, near Moscow.
1954 – The 1954 FIFA World Cup quarterfinal match between Hungary and Brazil, highly anticipated to be exciting, instead turns violent, with three players ejected and further fighting continuing after the game.
1957 – Hurricane Audrey makes landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border, killing over 400 people, mainly in and around Cameron, Louisiana.
1971 – After only three years in business, rock promoter Bill Graham closes the Fillmore East in New York, New York, the "Church of Rock and Roll".
1973 – The President of Uruguay Juan María Bordaberry dissolves Parliament and establishes a dictatorship.
1974 – U.S. president Richard Nixon visits the Soviet Union.
1976 – Air France Flight 139 (Tel Aviv-Athens-Paris) is hijacked en route to Paris by the PLO and redirected to Entebbe, Uganda.
1977 – France grants independence to Djibouti.
1980 – Italian Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 mysteriously explodes in mid air while in route from Bologna to Palermo, killing all 81 on board. Also known in Italy as the Ustica disaster
1981 – The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issues its "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China", laying the blame for the Cultural Revolution on Mao Zedong.
1982 – Space Shuttle Columbia launched from the Kennedy Space Center on the final research and development flight mission, STS-4.
1985 – The U.S. Route 66 is closed
1988 – Gare de Lyon rail accident In Paris a train collides with a stationary train killing 56 people.
1991 – Slovenia, after declaring independence two days before is invaded by Yugoslav troops, tanks, and aircraft starting the Ten-Day War.
2007 – Tony Blair British Prime Minister since 2nd May 1997, resigns
2007 – The Brazilian Military Police invades the favelas of Complexo do Alemão in an episode which is remembered as the Complexo do Alemão massacre.
2008 – In a highly-scrutizined election President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe is re-elected in a landslide after his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai had withdrawn a week earlier, citing violence against his party's supporters.


Russian battleship Potemkin

The Russian battleship Potemkin (Russian: Князь Потёмкин Таврический, Kniaz Potemkin Tavritchesky, "Prince Potemkin of Tauris") was a pre-dreadnought battleship built for the Imperial Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet. The ship was made famous by the rebellion of the crew against their oppressive officers in June 1905 (during the Russian Revolution of 1905). It later came to be viewed as an initial step towards the Russian Revolution of 1917, and was the basis of Sergei Eisenstein's silent film The Battleship Potemkin (1925).

Following the mutiny in 1905, the ship's name was changed to Panteleimon. She accidentally sank a Russian submarine in 1909 and was badly damaged when she ran aground in 1911. Panteleimon participated in the Battle of Cape Sarych shortly after Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire in late 1914 during World War I. She covered several bombardments of the Bosphorus fortifications in early 1915, including one where she was attacked by the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben, but Panteleimon, together with the other Russian pre-dreadnoughts, managed to drive her off. The ship was relegated to secondary roles after the first dreadnought entered service in late 1915 and reduced to reserve in 1918 in Sevastopol.

Panteleimon was captured when the Germans took Sevastopol in May 1918 and was turned over to the Allies after the Armistice in November 1918. Her engines were destroyed in 1919 by the British when they withdrew from Sevastopol to prevent the advancing Bolsheviks from using them against the White Russians. She was abandoned when the Whites evacuated the Crimea in 1920 and was finally scrapped by the Soviets in 1923.


Iași pogrom

The Iaşi pogrom or Jassy pogrom of June 27, 1941 was one of the most violent pogroms in Jewish history, launched by governmental forces in the Romanian city of Iaşi (Jassy) against its Jewish population, resulting in the murder of at least 13,266 Jews, according to Romanian authorities.

The Romanian People's Tribunals were conducted in 1946 and a total of fifty-seven people were tried for the Iaşi pogroms: 8 from the higher military echelons, the prefect of Iaşi county and the mayor of Iaşi, 4 military figures, 21 civilians and 22 gendarmes. One hundred sixty-five witnesses, mostly survivors of the pogrom, were called to the stand.

The majority of those sentenced under war crimes and crimes against peace (article 2 of Law no. 291/1947), 23 people (including generals and colonels), received life sentences with hard labor and 100 million lei in damages. One colonel received a life sentence in harsh conditions and 100 million lei in damages. The next-largest group, twelve accused, were sentenced to 20 years hard labor each. Sentences of 25 years hard labor were received by 7 accused. Smaller groups received a 20 year harsh sentence and 15 years hard labor, and one accused was sentenced to 5 years hard labor. Several accused were acquitted.


STS-4

STS-4 was the fourth NASA Space Shuttle mission, and also the fourth for Space Shuttle Columbia. The mission launched on 27 June 1982 and landed a week later on 4 July. STS-4 carried numerous scientific payloads, as well as military missile detection systems.

STS-4, being the last test flight of the Space Shuttle, was also the last to carry a crew of two astronauts. Commander Ken Mattingly had previously flown as Command Module Pilot on Apollo 16, and was also the original Command Module Pilot for Apollo 13 before being infamously replaced by his backup, Jack Swigert. Mattingly was also instrumental in returning the Apollo 13 crew safely back to Earth after the accident that prevented them from landing on the Moon. Hartsfield was a rookie who had transferred to NASA in 1969 after the cancellation of the Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory program. He had previously served as a capsule communicator on Apollo 16, all three Skylab missions, and STS-1.

[Duke of Buckingham]

June 28

1098 – Fighters of the First Crusade defeat Kerbogha of Mosull.
1360 – Muhammed VI becomes the tenth Nasrid king of Granada after killing his brother-in-law Ismail II.
1389 – Battle of Kosovo between Serbian and Turkish armies.
1461 – Edward IV is crowned King of England.
1519 – Charles V is elected Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
1635 – Guadeloupe becomes a French colony.
1651 – The Battle of Beresteczko between Poland and Ukraine starts.
1709 – Peter the Great defeats Charles XII of Sweden at the Battle of Poltava.
1745 – War of the Austrian Succession: A New England colonial army captures Louisbourg, New France, after a forty-seven-day siege (New Style).
1776 – The Battle of Sullivan's Island ends with the first decisive American victory in the American Revolutionary War leading to the commemoration of Carolina Day.
1776 – Thomas Hickey, Continental Army private and bodyguard to General George Washington, is hanged for mutiny and sedition.
1778 – The American Continentals engage the British in the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse resulting in standstill and British withdrawal under cover of darkness.
1807 – Second British invasion of the Río de la Plata; John Whitelock lands at Ensenada on an attempt to recapture Buenos Aires and is defeated by the locals.
1838 – Coronation of Victoria of the United Kingdom.
1841 – The Paris Opera Ballet premieres Giselle in the Salle Le Peletier
1859 – The first conformation dog show is held in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England.
1865 – The Army of the Potomac is disbanded.
1880 – The Australian bushranger Ned Kelly is captured at Glenrowan.
1881 – Secret treaty between Austria and Serbia.
1882 – The Anglo-French Convention of 1882 marks the territorial boundaries between Guinea and Sierra Leone.
1894 – Labor Day becomes an official US holiday.
1895 – El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua form the Greater Republic of Central America.
1895 – Court of Private Land Claims rules James Reavis' claim to Barony of Arizona is "wholly fictitious and fraudulent."
1896 – An explosion in the Newton Coal Company's Twin Shaft Mine in Pittston City, Pennsylvania results in a massive cave-in that kills 58 miners.
1902 – The U.S. Congress passes the Spooner Act, authorizing President Theodore Roosevelt to acquire rights from Colombia for the Panama Canal.
1904 – The SS Norge runs aground and sinks
1914 – Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and his wife are assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, the casus belli of World War I.
1919 – The Treaty of Versailles is signed in Paris, bringing fighting to an end in between Germany and the Allies of World War I.
1921 – Serbian King Alexander I proclaimed the new constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, known thereafter as the Vidovdan Constitution.
1922 – The Irish Civil War begins with the shelling of the Four Courts in Dublin by Free State forces.
1936 – The Japanese puppet state of Mengjiang is formed in northern China.
1940 – Romania cedes Bessarabia (current-day Moldova) to the Soviet Union.
1942 – Nazi Germany started its strategic summer offensive against the Soviet Union, codenamed Case Blue
1948 – The Cominform circulates the "Resolution on the situation in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia"; Yugoslavia is expelled from the Communist bloc.
1948 – Boxer Dick Turpin beats Vince Hawkins at Villa Park in Birmingham to become the first black British boxing champion in the modern era.
1950 – Korean War: Seoul is captured by North Korean troops.
1950 – Korean War: Suspected communist sympathizers, argued to be between 100,000 and 200,000 are executed in the Bodo League massacre.
1950 – Korean War: Packed with its own refugees fleeing Seoul and leaving their 5th Division stranded, South Korean forces blow up the Hangang Bridge to in attempt to slow North Korea's offensive.
1950 – Korean War: North Korean Army conducted Seoul National University Hospital Massacre.
1956 – in Poznań, workers from HCP factory went to the streets, sparking one of the first major protests against communist government both in Poland and Europe.
1964 – Malcolm X forms the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
1967 – Israel annexes East Jerusalem.
1969 – Stonewall Riots begin in New York City marking the start of the Gay Rights Movement.
1973 – Elections are held for the Northern Ireland Assembly, which will lead to power-sharing between unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland for the first time.
1976 – The Angolan court sentenced US and UK mercenaries to death sentences and prison terms in the Luanda Trial.
1978 – The United States Supreme Court, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke bars quota systems in college admissions.
1981 – A powerful bomb explodes in Tehran, killing 73 officials of Islamic Republic Party.
1983 – Partial collapse of Connecticut's busy I-95 Mianus River Bridge, killing three.
1987 – For the first time in military history, a civilian population was targeted for chemical attack when Iraqi warplanes bombed the Iranian town of Sardasht.
1989 – On the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Slobodan Milošević delivers the Gazimestan speech at the 8site of the historic battle.
1992 – The Constitution of Estonia is signed into law.
1994 – Members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult release sarin gas in Matsumoto, Japan; 7 persons are killed, 660 injured.
1996 – The Constitution of Ukraine is signed into law.
1997 – Holyfield–Tyson II – Mike Tyson is disqualified in the 3rd round for biting a piece off Evander Holyfield's ear.
2001 – Slobodan Milošević deported to ICTY to stand trial.
2004 – Sovereign power is handed to the interim government of Iraq by the Coalition Provisional Authority, ending the U.S.-led rule of that nation.
2009 – Honduran president Manuel Zelaya is ousted by a local military coup following a failed request to hold a referendum to rewrite the Honduran Constitution. This was the start of the 2009 Honduran political crisis.


Siege of Louisbourg (1745)

The Siege of Louisbourg took place in 1745 when a New England colonial force aided by a British fleet captured Louisbourg, the capital of the French province of Île-Royale (present-day Cape Breton Island) during the War of the Austrian Succession, known as King George's War in the British colonies.

Louisbourg was an important bargaining chip in the peace negotiations to end the war, since it represented a major British success. Factions within the British government were opposed to returning it to the French as part of any peace agreement, but these were eventually overruled, and Louisbourg was returned, over the objections of the victorious colonists, to French control after the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.


SS Norge

SS Norge was a Danish passenger liner sailing from Copenhagen, Oslo and Kristiansand to New York, mainly with emigrants, which sank off Rockall in 1904. It remained the biggest civilian maritime disaster in the Atlantic Ocean until the sinking of the RMS Titanic eight years later.


Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles (French: Traité de Versailles) was one of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. It ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The other Central Powers on the German side of World War I were dealt with in separate treaties. Although the armistice, signed on 11 November 1918, ended the actual fighting, it took six months of negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty. The treaty was registered by the Secretariat of the League of Nations on 21 October 1919, and was printed in The League of Nations Treaty Series.


Bodo League massacre

The Bodo League massacre (Hangul: 보도연맹 사건; Hanja: 保導聯盟事件) was a massacre and war crime against communists and suspected sympathizers that occurred in the summer of 1950 during the Korean War. Estimates of the death toll vary. According to Prof. Kim Dong-Choon, Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at least 100,000 people were executed on suspicion of supporting communism; others estimate 200,000 deaths. The massacre was wrongly blamed on the communists for decades.


Luanda Trial
The Luanda Trial was a trial held in Luanda, Angola in June and July 1976 by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), to prosecute thirteen foreign mercenaries who had served its defeated rival, the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA).

[Duke of Buckingham]

June 29

226 – Cao Pi dies after an illness; his son Cao Rui succeeds him as emperor of the Kingdom of Wei.
1149 – Raymond of Poitiers is defeated and killed at the Battle of Inab by Nur ad-Din Zangi.
1194 – Sverre is crowned King of Norway.
1444 – Skanderbeg defeats an Ottoman invasion force at Torvioll.
1534 – Jacques Cartier is the first European to reach Prince Edward Island.
1613 – The Globe Theatre in London, England burns to the ground.
1644 – Charles I of England defeats a Parliamentarian detachment at the Battle of Cropredy Bridge, the last battle won by an English King on English soil.
1659 – At the Battle of Konotop the Ukrainian armies of Ivan Vyhovsky defeat the Russians led by Prince Trubetskoy.
1776 – First privateer battle of the American Revolutionary War fought at Turtle Gut Inlet near Cape May, New Jersey
1776 – Father Francisco Palou founds Mission San Francisco de Asis in what is now San Francisco, California.
1786 – Alexander Macdonell and over five hundred Roman Catholic highlanders leave Scotland to settle in Glengarry County, Ontario.
1807 – Russo-Turkish War: Admiral Dmitry Senyavin destroys the Ottoman fleet in the Battle of Athos.
1850 – Autocephaly officially granted by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Church of Greece.
1864 – Ninety-nine people are killed in Canada's worst railway disaster near St-Hilaire, Quebec.
1874 – Greek politician Charilaos Trikoupis publishes a manifesto in the Athens daily Kairoi entitled "Who's to Blame?" in which he lays out his complaints against King George. He is elected Prime Minister of Greece the next year.
1880 – France annexes Tahiti.
1881 – In Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad declares himself to be the Mahdi, the messianic redeemer of Islam.
1888 – George Edward Gouraud records Handel's Israel in Egypt onto a phonograph cylinder, thought for many years to be the oldest known recording of music.
1889 – Hyde Park and several other Illinois townships vote to be annexed by Chicago, forming the largest United States city in area and second largest in population.
1895 – Doukhobors burn their weapons as a protest against conscription by the Tsarist Russian government.
1914 – Jina Guseva attempts to assassinate Grigori Rasputin at his home town in Siberia.
1916 – The Irish Nationalist and British diplomat Sir Roger Casement is sentenced to death for his part in the Easter Rising.
1922 – France grants 1 km² at Vimy Ridge "freely, and for all time, to the Government of Canada, the free use of the land exempt from all taxes".
1926 – Arthur Meighen returns to office as Prime Minister of Canada.
1927 – The Bird of Paradise, a U.S. Army Air Corps Fokker tri-motor, completes the first transpacific flight, from the mainland United States to Hawaii.
1927 – First test of Wallace Turnbull's controllable pitch propeller.
1928 – The Outerbridge Crossing and Goethals Bridge in Staten Island, New York are both opened.
1945 – Carpathian Ruthenia is annexed by the Soviet Union.
1956 – The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 is signed, officially creating the United States Interstate Highway System.
1972 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in the case Furman v. Georgia that arbitrary and inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
1974 – Isabel Perón is sworn in as the first female President of Argentina. Her husband, President Juan Peron, had delegated responsibility due to weak health and died two days later.
1974 – Mikhail Baryshnikov defects from the Soviet Union to Canada while on tour with the Kirov Ballet.
1976 – The Seychelles become independent from the United Kingdom.
1995 – Space Shuttle program: STS-71 Mission (Atlantis) docks with the Russian space station Mir for the first time.
1995 – The Sampoong Department Store collapses in the Seocho-gu district of Seoul, South Korea, killing 501 and injuring 937.
2002 – Naval clashes between South Korea and North Korea lead to the death of six South Korean sailors and sinking of a North Korean vessel.
2006 – Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that President George W. Bush's plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violates U.S. and international law.
2007 – Apple Inc. releases its first mobile phone, the iPhone.
2012 – A derecho strikes the eastern United States, leaving at least 22 people dead and millions without power.



Battle of Inab

The Battle of Inab, also called Battle of Ard al-Hâtim or Fons Muratus, was fought on June 29, 1149, during the Second Crusade. The Syrian army of Nur ad-Din Zangi destroyed the Crusader army of Raymond of Antioch and the allied followers of Ali ibn-Wafa.


Jacques Cartier

Jacques Cartier (December 31, 1491 – September 1, 1557) was a French explorer of Breton origin who claimed what is now Canada for France.

Jacques Cartier was the first European to describe and map the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River, which he named "The Country of Canadas", after the Iroquois names for the two big settlements he saw at Stadacona (Quebec City) and at Hochelaga (Montreal Island).

In 1534, the year the Duchy of Brittany was formally united with France in the Edict of Union, Cartier was introduced to King Francis I by Jean le Veneur, bishop of Saint-Malo and abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel, at the Manoir de Brion. The king had previously invited (although not formally commissioned) the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano to explore the eastern coast of North America on behalf of France in 1524. Le Veneur cited voyages to Newfoundland and Brazil as proof of Cartier's ability to "lead ships to the discovery of new lands in the New World".


George Edward Gouraud

George Edward Gouraud (30 June 1842 - 20 February 1912) was an American Civil War recipient of the Medal of Honor who later became famous for introducing the new Edison Phonograph cylinder audio recording technology to England in 1888.


Wallace Rupert Turnbull

Wallace Rupert Turnbull was a New Brunswick engineer and inventor, born on October 16, 1870 in Saint John, NB. The Saint John Airport was briefly named after him. He died November 24, 1954. He was inducted in the Canada's Aviation Hall of Fame in 1977.


Carpathian Ruthenia

Carpathian Ruthenia, Carpatho-Ukraine, or Zakarpattia (Rusyn and Ukrainian: Карпатська Русь, Karpats’ka Rus’; or Закарпаття, Zakarpattya; Hungarian: Kárpátalja; Slovak and Czech: Podkarpatská Rus; Romanian: Transcarpatia or Maramureș; Polish: Zakarpacie; German: Karpatenukraine; Russian: Подкарпатская Русь, Podkarpatskaya Rus’; or Закарпатье, Zakarpatye), is a region in Eastern Europe, mostly located in western Ukraine's Zakarpattia Oblast (Ukrainian: Zakarpats’ka oblast’), with smaller parts in easternmost Slovakia (largely in Prešov kraj and Košice kraj) and Poland's Lemkovyna.

Zakarpattia as an administrative region in Ukraine inhabited by Ukrainians (80.5%), Hungarians (12.1%), Romanians (2.6%), Russians (2.5%), Romanis (Gypsies) (1.1%), Rusyns (0.8%), Slovaks (0.5%), Germans (0.3%) and others.


STS-71

STS-71 was the third mission of the US/Russian Shuttle-Mir Program, which carried out the first Space Shuttle docking to Mir, a Russian space station. The mission used Space Shuttle Atlantis, which lifted off from launch pad 39A on 27 June 1995 from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The mission delivered a relief crew of two cosmonauts, Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai Budarin, to the station, along with recovering American Increment astronaut Norman Thagard, and was the first in a series of seven straight missions to the station flown by Atlantis.

The five-day docking marked the creation of the largest spacecraft ever placed into orbit at that time in history, the first ever on-orbit changeout of Shuttle crew members, and the 100th manned space launch by the United States. During the docked operations, the crews of the shuttle & station carried out various on-orbit joint US/Russian life sciences investigations aboard Spacelab/Mir and a logistical resupply of the Mir, along with the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment-II (SAREX-II) experiment.

[Duke of Buckingham]

June 30

350 – Roman usurper Nepotianus, of the Constantinian dynasty, is defeated and killed by troops of the usurper Magnentius, in Rome.
1422 – Battle of Arbedo between the duke of Milan and the Swiss cantons.
1520 – Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés fight their way out of Tenochtitlan.
1521 – Spanish forces defeat a combined French and Navarrese army at the Battle of Noáin during the Spanish conquest of Iberian Navarre.
1559 – King Henry II of France is mortally wounded in a jousting match against Gabriel de Montgomery.
1651 – The Deluge: Khmelnytsky Uprising – the Battle of Beresteczko ends with a Polish victory.
1688 – The Immortal Seven issue the Invitation to William (continuing the English rebellion from Rome), which would culminate in the Glorious Revolution.
1758 – Seven Years' War: The Battle of Domstadtl takes place.
1794 – Native American forces under Blue Jacket attack Fort Recovery.
1805 – The U.S. Congress organizes the Michigan Territory.
1859 – French acrobat Charles Blondin crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope.
1860 – The 1860 Oxford evolution debate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History takes place.
1864 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln grants Yosemite Valley to California for "public use, resort and recreation".
1882 – Charles J. Guiteau is hanged in Washington, D.C. for the assassination of U.S. President James Garfield.
1886 – The first transcontinental train trip across Canada departs from Montreal. It arrives in Port Moody, British Columbia on July 4.
1905 – Albert Einstein publishes the article On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, in which he introduces special relativity.
1906 – The United States Congress passes the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act.
1908 – The Tunguska event occurs in remote Siberia.
1912 – The Regina Cyclone hits Regina, Saskatchewan, killing 28. It remains Canada's deadliest tornado event.
1917 – World War I: Greece declares war on the Central Powers.
1921 – U.S. President Warren G. Harding appoints former President William Howard Taft Chief Justice of the United States.
1922 – In Washington D.C., U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes and Dominican Ambassador Francisco J. Peynado sign the Hughes-Peynado agreement, which ends the United States occupation of the Dominican Republic.
1934 – The Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler's violent purge of his political rivals in Germany, takes place.
1935 – The Senegalese Socialist Party holds its first congress.
1936 – Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia appeals for aid to the League of Nations against Italy's invasion of his country.
1937 – The world's first emergency telephone number, 999, is introduced in London
1944 – World War II: The Battle of Cherbourg ends with the fall of the strategically valuable port to American forces.
1953 – The first Chevrolet Corvette rolls off the assembly line in Flint, Michigan.
1956 – A TWA Super Constellation and a United Airlines DC-7 collide above the Grand Canyon in Arizona and crash, killing all 128 on board both planes. It is the worst-ever aviation disaster at that point in time.
1959 – A United States Air Force F-100 Super Sabre from Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, crashes into a nearby elementary school, killing 11 students plus six residents from the local neighborhood.
1960 – Congo gains independence from Belgium.
1963 – Ciaculli massacre: a car bomb, intended for Mafia boss Salvatore Greco, kills seven police officers and military personnel near Palermo.
1966 – The National Organization for Women, the United States' largest feminist organization, is founded.
1968 – Pope Paul VI issues the Credo of the People of God.
1969 – Nigeria bans Red Cross aid to Biafra.
1971 – The crew of the Soviet Soyuz 11 spacecraft are killed when their air supply escapes through a faulty valve.
1971 – Ohio ratifies the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, reducing the voting age to 18, thereby putting the amendment into effect.
1972 – The first leap second is added to the UTC time system.
1977 – The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization disbands.
1985 – Thirty-nine American hostages from the hijacked TWA Flight 847 are freed in Beirut after being held for 17 days.
1986 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Bowers v. Hardwick that states can outlaw homosexual acts between consenting adults.
1987 – The Royal Canadian Mint introduces the $1 coin, known as the Loonie.
1990 – East Germany and West Germany merge their economies.
1991 – 32 miners are killed when a coal mine catches fire in the Donbass region of Ukraine and releases toxic gas.
1991 – Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, starts "The Great Gage Park Decency Drive" picketing the park, starting their notorious picketing campaign that would later include funerals of AIDS victims and fallen American military.
1997 – The United Kingdom transfers sovereignty over Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China.


La Noche Triste

La Noche Triste ("the sorrowful night") on June 30, 1520, was an important event during the Spanish conquest of Mexico, wherein Hernán Cortés and his army of Spanish conquistadors and native allies fought their way out of the Mexican capital at Tenochtitlan following the death of the Aztec king Moctezuma II, whom the Spaniards had been holding as a hostage. The event is so-named on account of the sorrow that Cortés and his surviving followers felt and expressed at the loss of life and treasure incurred in the escape from Tenochtitlan.


Battle of Berestechko

The Battle of Berestechko (Polish: Bitwa pod Beresteczkiem; Ukrainian: Берестецька битва, Битва під Берестечком) was fought between the Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, aided by their Crimean Tatar allies, and a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth army under King John II Casimir. Fought over three days from 28 to 30 June 1651, the battle took place in the Polish province of Volhynia. It was, very probably, the world's largest land battle of the 17th century.


1860 Oxford evolution debate

The 1860 Oxford evolution debate took place at the Oxford University Museum in Oxford, England, on 30 June 1860, seven months after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Several prominent British scientists and philosophers participated, including Thomas Henry Huxley, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, Benjamin Brodie, Joseph Dalton Hooker and Robert FitzRoy. The debate is best remembered today for a heated exchange in which Wilberforce supposedly asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey.


Yosemite Valley

Yosemite Valley (/joʊˈsɛmɨtiː/ yoh-SEM-i-tee) is a glacial valley in Yosemite National Park in the western Sierra Nevada mountains of California. The valley is about 8 miles (13 km) long and up to a mile deep, surrounded by high granite summits such as Half Dome and El Capitan, and densely forested with pines. The valley is drained by the Merced River and a multitude of streams including Tenaya, Illilouette, Yosemite and Bridalveil Creeks, which form some of the highest waterfalls of California. The valley is renowned for its natural beauty, and is widely regarded as the centerpiece of Yosemite National Park, attracting visitors from around the world.

The Valley is the main attraction in the park for the majority of visitors, and a bustling hub of activity during "tourist season", with an array of visitor facilities clustered in the middle. There are both hiking trail loops that stay within the valley and trailheads that lead to higher elevations, all of which afford glimpses of the park's many scenic wonders.


Tunguska event

The Tunguska event was an enormously powerful explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, at about 07:14 KRAT (00:14 UT) on June 30, 1908. The explosion, having the epicentre (60.886°N, 101.894°E), is believed to have been caused by the air burst of a small asteroid or comet at an altitude of 5–10 kilometres (3–6 mi) above Earth's surface. Different studies have yielded widely varying estimates of the object's size, on the order of 60 m (200 ft) to 190 m (620 ft). It is the largest impact event on or near Earth in recorded history.


National Organization for Women

The National Organization for Women (NOW) is an organization founded in 1966. It has a membership of 550,000 contributing members set up for the advancement of women. The organization consists of 550 chapters in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.