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Events, deaths, births, of APR 04

[For Apr 04 Julian go to Gregorian date:
1583~1699: Apr 141700s: Apr 151800s: Apr 161900~2099: Apr 17]
ALTERNATE SITES    ALL FOR 030404      ANY DAY  OF THE YEAR IN HISTORY     ART “4” APR 04
• NATO pact signed... • Martin Luther King assassination... is announced by Robert Kennedy... • MLK against Vietnam war... • US senate votes war on Germany... • US President dies 1 month after inauguration... • A slave's beating helps lead to US Civil War... • Declaration of Breda... • Mobile telephone communication... • Prodigy buyout... • 2nd battle of the Somme ends... • Baby Lift plane crashes... • Embargo on British trade... • Birth of Pearl Harbor attack planner... • Guillotinés par la Terreur... • Saint Isidore dies... • Woodstock appears in Peanuts... • New Jaguar car...
CBM price chartOn an April 04:
2003 Cambrex Corporation (CBM) forecasts 2003 earnings of about $1.15 per share (due in part to 32 cents per share for a settlement of claims from Mylan Laboratories), while analysts expected $2.05. On the New York Stock Exchange, 3.5 million of the 26 million CBM shares are traded, dropping from their previous close of $24.16 to an intraday low of $15.15 and closing at $15.25. They had traded as high as $43.94 as recently as 24 May 2002 and $56.98 on 04 June 2001. [5~year price chart >] CBM produces specialty chemicals and fine chemicals as well as products and services for the life sciences industry.
2001 Experts add to the list of paintings no longer thought to be from Goya [30 Mar 1746 – 16 Apr 1828] El Coloso and La Lechera de Burdeos. — links to both images.
2000 In a volatile day on the US stock market, the Nasdaq composite index and the Dow Jones industrial average each plunged more than 500 points before reversing course as buyers flooded back into the market.
2000  Se clausurada la primera cumbre entre la Unión Europea y África, celebrada en El Cairo
1998  Cinco mil okupas salen en masa a las calles de Turín (Italia) para protestar por el suicidio de un compañero en la cárcel. 
1998 Un laboratorio farmacéutico holandés desarrolla un anticonceptivo 100% efectivo.
1997  Veintiún países del Consejo de Europa firman el Convenio sobre Derechos Humanos y Biomedicina, que prohíbe la clonación humana.
1996 Prodigy's management plans buyout       ^top^
     News media report that the management team of online service Prodigy Services was planning a management buyout of the languishing online service. Prodigy, founded in 1984 as a joint venture between IBM and Sears, had won early success as an online service but then fell on hard times as the Internet eclipsed the popularity of online services. The buyout proved successful: The new owners gradually transformed Prodigy into an Internet service provider.
1996 President Clinton signed legislation severing the link between crop prices and government subsidies.
1996 The former general manager of Daiwa Bank's New York branch pleaded guilty to aiding a $1.1 billion cover-up.
1996 In its IPO, just two days after Lycos and a week before Yahoo!, Search engine Excite's stock opens at $17 and closen at $20.
1992 Jury deliberations begin in Noriega case.
1992 Sali Berisha becomes president/Alexander Meksi premier of Albania.
1990  El rey de Bélgica Balduino I renuncia durante dos días para que pueda entrar en vigor una ley que liberaliza el aborto, rechazada por él.
1989 une manifestation populaire sur la place Tian’anmen à la mémoire de Zhou Enlai tourna à l’attaque contre les radicaux maoïstes. Les Chinois avaient peur d’une nouvelle révolution culturelle, et les manifestants dénonçaient l’autocratie avec des poèmes et des citations de l’ère impériale. Cette apparition du peuple fut brève, et la répression fut lourde. Ô Peuple, pleure avec tristesse toutes les larmes de ton corps S’il en reste encore après ces années de tortures et d’oppression. Et puise dans les larmes et dans le sang le courage qu’il te faudra Car le plus dur est encore à venir.
1987 Dow Jones up 69.89 points, ending at record 2390.34
1981 Henry Cisneros becomes the first Mexican-American elected mayor of a major US city — San Antonio, Texas.
1981  Mario Moretti, último jefe de las Brigadas Rojas, es detenido en Milán.
1976 Seni Pramoj's Democratic Party wins elections in Thailand.
1975  El número correspondiente al 06 Apr 1975 de la publicación satírica La Codorniz es secuestrado por las autoridades españolas, al entender que el artículo titulado "Diálogos de alcoba" pudiera constituir delito.
1973  Héctor José Cámpora y Solano Lima se hacen cargo respectivamente, de la presidencia y la vicepresidencia de la República de Argentina.
1972 first electric power plant fueled by garbage begins operating.
1969  El cirujano Denton Arthur Cooley y el médico Domingo Liott consiguen implantar un corazón artificial.
1968 Robert Kennedy announces the King assassination       ^top^
     Amid the tragedy of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, 04 April 1968, an extraordinary moment in US political history occurred as Robert F. Kennedy, younger brother of slain President John F. Kennedy, broke the news of King's death to a large gathering of Blacks in Indianapolis, Indiana. Just two months later, Robert Kennedy was gunned down during a celebration following his victory in the California primary, 05 June 1968.
      The Indianapolis gathering was actually a planned campaign rally for Robert Kennedy in his bid to get the 1968 Democratic nomination for President. Just after he arrived by plane at Indianapolis, Kennedy was told of King's death. He was advised by police against making the campaign stop which was in a part of the city considered to be a dangerous ghetto. But Kennedy insisted on going. He arrived to find the people in an upbeat mood, anticipating the excitement of a Kennedy appearance. He climbed onto the platform, and realizing they did not know, broke the news:
Ladies and Gentlemen — I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening. Because...
     
I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
     
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.
     
For those of you who are black — considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.
     
We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization — black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.
     
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
     
But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.
     
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
     
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. (Interrupted by applause)
     
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love — a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.
     
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land. (Interrupted by applause)
     
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
     
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much. (Applause)
1967 Martin Luther King, Jr., speaks out against Vietnam war.       ^top^
      The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, says in a speech that there is a common link forming between the civil rights and peace movements. King proposed that the United States stop all bombing of North and South Vietnam; declare a unilateral truce in the hope that it would lead to peace talks; set a date for withdrawal of all troops from Vietnam; and give the National Liberation Front a role in negotiations. King had been a solid supporter of President Lyndon B. Johnson and his "Great Society," but he became increasingly concerned about US involvement in Vietnam and, as his concerns became more public, his relationship with the Johnson administration deteriorated. King came to view US intervention in Southeast Asia as little more than imperialism disguised as "fighting the communists". Additionally, he believed that the Vietnam War diverted money and attention from domestic programs created to aid the black poor. King maintained his antiwar stance and supported peace movements until he was assassinated on 04 April 1968.
Voodstock1967 Woodstock first appears in Peanuts [shown below]       ^top^
    Woodstock is the smallest of the Peanuts characters but has a big presence for a little bird. He's a little inept, his flying and logic are erratic, but he can type and take shorthand and usually is game for anything Snoopy wants to do. Although he's the butt of many of Snoopy's practical jokes, he's the beagle's closest friend and confidant- and has made attempts at retaliation. Because of his size and the company he keeps, Woodstock is an accident waiting to happen. Being a bird and tiny, he gets a little insecure around Thanksgiving and big moving objects. He's the only baseball player who gets an automatic walk if the ball rolls over him. Woodstock talks birdspeak only, and finds an alphabet made up entirely of exclamation points quite adequate to express such emotions as distress, frustration and a real temper. His flocking friends are Bill, Harriet, Olivier and Conrad.
Woodstock's first strip
1967  Las Cortes españolas aprueban la reforma parcial del código penal, que impone dura pena a los delitos de prensa, aunque no establece censura previa.
1967 Guillermo de Torre recibe el premio de los escritores europeos por su obra Historia de las literaturas de vanguardia.
1964  El presidente de la República de Chipre, Makarios III, abroga unilateralmente el tratado de 1959 con Grecia y Turquía. 
1960 Senegal declares independence from France.
1959 Fed of Mali, consisting of Senegal and French Sudan (dissolved 1960).
1958  10'000 personas se manifiestan en Londres contra la bomba bomba atómica.
1956  El Gobierno español reconoce la independencia marroquí. 
1955 British govt signs military treaty with Iraq.
1954  Se crea en El Cairo el Frente de Liberación del Magreb árabe. 
1953  Un submarino turco se hunde en los Dardanelos, después de colisionar con un buque sueco. 
1949 Israel and Jordan sign armistice agreement.
1949  Se firma en Washington el Tratado del Atlántico Norte (OTAN) para la defensa de Europa. 
1947 Convention on International Civil Aviation goes into effect.
1947 Largest group of sunspots on record.
1947 UN's International Civil Aviation Organization forms.
1946  Juan Domingo Perón Sosa toma posesión de la presidencia argentina. 
1945 Hungary liberated from Nazi occupation (National Day).
1945 US forces liberate the Nazi death camp Ohrdruf in Germany.
1944 British troops capture Addis Ababa Ethiopia.
1944 De Gaulle forms new regime in exile, with Communists.
1943  El médico neerlandés Willem Johan Kolff consigue mantener con vida por medio de un aparato construido por él mismo, a un paciente en fase terminal de una uremia.
1941 German troops conquer Banghazi.
1939 Faisal II ascends to throne of Iraq. —  Después de la muerte en accidente de automóvil del rey Giza I de Irak, es proclamado rey del país su hijo Faysal II. 
1932 Vitamin C first isolated, CC King, Univ of Pittsburgh.
1926 Greek dictator Theodorus Pangalos elected president.
1926  Regresan al Puerto de Palos (Huelva) los tripulantes del hidroavión español Plus Ultra, tras la triunfante travesía del Atlántico Sur, la primera del mundo efectuada con un hidroavión.
1920 Arabs attack Jews in Jerusalem. —  Se producen violentos enfrentamientos en Jerusalén entre judíos y árabes.
1918 Second battle of the Somme ends       ^top^
     During World War I, the Second Battle of the Somme, the first major German offensive in over a year, ended on the Western Front.
      On 21 March, 1918, a major offensive against Allied positions in the Somme River region of France began with five hours of bombardment from more than 9000 pieces of German artillery. The poorly prepared British Fifth Army was rapidly overwhelmed and forced into retreat. For a week, the Germans pushed towards Paris, even shelling the city from a distance of some 130 km with their "Big Bertha" cannons. However, the poorly supplied German troops soon became exhausted and the Allies managed to halt their advance as French artillery knocked out the German guns besieging Paris. By the time the Somme Offensive ended on 04 April, the Germans had advanced 60 km, inflicted some 200'000 casualties, and captured 70'000 prisoners and over 1000 Allied guns.
      However, Germany suffered nearly as many casualties as its enemies, and lacked the fresh reserves and supplies enjoyed by the Allies following the American entrance into the war. During the Second Battle of the Somme, several thousand American troops fought along side the British and French in the defense of Paris.
1917 US Senate votes war against Germany       ^top^
82 to 6. Two days later the US House of Representatives endorses the declaration of war by a vote of 373 to 50.
      On 02 April, President Woodrow Wilson, who initially sought a peaceful resolution to the war in Europe, had appeared before a joint session of Congress and urged a declaration of war, citing Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare against US vessels traveling in the Atlantic. On 28 January 1915, six months after the outbreak of the war, Germany sunk the first neutral US vessel traveling between America and England. The US government was outraged, but the German government apologized and called the attack an unfortunate mistake. However, on 07 April of the same year, a German submarine torpedoed the British steamship Lusitania, the queen of the Cunard Line, off the coast of Ireland. The unarmed vessel was destroyed and 1198 persons were killed, including 114 Americans and sixty-three infants. The German government maintained that the Lusitania was sunk in self-defense, but the US demanded reparations and an end to German attacks on unarmed passenger and merchant ships. On 31 January, the German ambassador delivered a note to the US State Department formally announcing the renewal of Germany's submarine warfare against both neutral and belligerent ships. On 03 February 1917, the US severed diplomatic relations with Germany hours before the US liner Housatonic was sunk by a German U-boat. Two months later, the US Congress declared war against Germany, and America entered World War I. After four years of bloody stalemate along the Western Front, the entrance of America's well-supplied forces into the conflict was a major turning point in the war. When the war finally ended on 11 November, 1918, more than two million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some fifty thousand of these men had lost their lives
1915 Mobile telephone communication       ^top^
      Bell system engineers successfully establish a one-way mobile telephone link between Montauk Point, New York, and Wilmington, Delaware. Commercial mobile phone service was established in 1920, when a radio link connected Catalina Island, California, to telephone lines in Long Beach, California. After three years, the system was replaced by more secure cable lines. In 1946, Southwestern Bell Telephone in St. Louis began offering commercial mobile phone services for automobiles.
1914 Albania decreta la movilización general y amenaza con entrar en guerra contra Grecia. 
1912 Army fires on striking mine workers at Lena-gold fields Siberia.
1912 Chinese republic proclaimed in Tibet.
1905  Un gran terremoto asola la zona noroeste del Himalaya.
1902 British financier Cecil Rhodes leaves $10 million in his will to provide scholarships for US students at Oxford University.
1900 British garrison of Reddersberg surrenders to Boer general De Wet.
1900 La autoridad militar española se hace cargo de la administración de Puerto Rico.
1896 Announcement of Gold in Yukon.
1866 Tsar Alexander II [29 Apr 1818 – 13 Mar 1881] narrowly escapes, in Kiev, an assassination attempt. This results in The Great Gate of Kiev that would never be built. — more with an image.
1865 Lee's army arrives at Amelia Courthouse.
1865 Lincoln visits Richmond, Virginia.
1865 Siege at Spanish Fort, Alabama continues.
1864 Skirmish at Elkin's Ford (Little Missouri River), Arkansas.
1862 Battle of Yorktown begins.
1862 US begins Peninsular Campaign aimed at capturing Richmond.
1862 Federal ironclad gunboat Carondelet runs the batteries at Island No. 10 on the Mississippi River.
1850 The city of Los Angeles is incorporated.
1849  Austria incorpora Hungría a la monarquía unitaria austro-húngara. 
Dred Scott1846 Slave Dred Scott is beaten by his owner       ^top^
     According to a declaration that Scott filed two days later, on this day his owner had "beat, bruised, and ill-treated him" and imprisoned him for twelve hours.
     Scott's beginnings were quite humble. Born somewhere in Virginia, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, with his owners in 1830 and was sold to Dr. John Emerson sometime between 1831 and 1833. Emerson, as an Army doctor, was a frequent traveler, so between his sale to Emerson and Emerson's death in late 1843, Scott lived for extended periods of time in Fort Armstrong, Illinois, Fort Snelling, Wisconsin Territory, Fort Jessup, Louisiana, and in St. Louis. During his travels, Scott lived for a total of seven years in areas closed to slavery; Illinois was a free state and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had closed the Wisconsin Territory to slavery.
      In April 1846, Scott lived in St. Louis and was the property of Emerson's wife. On 06 April 1846, besides reporting the mistreatment he had suffered from Mrs. Emerson, Scott declared that he was free by virtue of his residence at Fort Armstrong and Fort Snelling. He had strong legal backing for this declaration; the Supreme Court of Missouri had freed many slaves who had traveled with their masters in free states. In the Missouri Supreme Court's 1836 Rachel v. Walker ruling, it decided that Rachel, a slave taken to Fort Snelling and to Prairie du Chien in Illinois, was free.
      Despite these precedents, Mrs. Emerson won the first Scott v. Emerson trial by slipping through a technical loophole; Scott took the second trial by closing the loophole. In 1850, the case reached the Missouri Supreme Court, the same court that had freed Rachel just fourteen years earlier. Unfortunately for Scott, the intervening fourteen years had been important ones in terms of sectional conflict. The precedents in his favor were the work of "liberal-minded judges who were predisposed to favor freedom and whose opinions seemed to reflect the older view of enlightened southerners that slavery was, at best, a necessary evil."
      By the early 1850's, however, sectional conflict had arisen again and uglier than ever, and most Missourians did not encourage the freeing of slaves. Even judicially Scott was at a disadvantage; the United States Supreme Court's Strader v. Graham decision (1851) set some precedents that were unfavorable to Scott, and two of the three justices who made the final decision in Scott's appearance before the Missouri Supreme Court were proslavery.
      As would be expected, they ruled against Scott in 1852, with the third judge dissenting. Scott's next step was to take his case out of the state judicial system and into the federal judicial system by bringing it to the US Circuit Court for the District of Missouri. As Scott's new master, J. F. A. Sanford, was a resident of New York, the court decided to hear the case on the basis of the diversity of state citizenship represented. After this court decided against Scott, the case came on appeal to the US Supreme Court, which was divided along slavery and antislavery lines; although the Southern justices had a majority.
     On 12 February 1793, the US Congress had passed the first fugitive slave law, requiring all states, including those that forbid slavery, to forcibly return slaves who have escaped from other states to their original owners. . Northern states' disregard of this law enraged Southern states, and as part of the Compromise of 1850, the US Congressed passed a second fugitive slave law on 18 September 1950, calling for the return of slaves "on pain of heavy penalty." In addition, these fugitives would be allowed a jury trial but they would be prohibited from testifying in their own defense.
      During the US Supreme Court trial of the Dred Scott case, the antislavery justices used the case to defend the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, which had been repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The Southern majority responded by ruling on 06 March 1857, in Sanford v. Dred Scott, that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. Three of the Southern justices also held that African Americans who were slaves or whose ancestors were slaves were not entitled to the rights of a federal citizen and therefore had no standing in court.
      These rulings all confirmed that, in the view of the nation’s highest judicial court, under no condition did Dred Scott have the legal right to request his freedom. The Supreme Court’s verdict further inflamed the irrepressible differences in America over the issue of slavery, which in 1861 erupted with the outbreak of the American Civil War.
     On Martin Luther King Day, 15 January 2001, the web site http://www.library.wustl.edu/vlib/dredscott was inaugurated with 170 pages of the court records of Dred Scott's unsuccessful challenge of Missouri slavery law.
1832 Charles Darwin aboard HMS Beagle reaches Rio de Janeiro 1850 City of Los Angeles incorporated.
1828 Casparus van Wooden patents chocolate milk powder (Amsterdam)
1826 Accord anglo-turco-russe: début d'une salade grecque. Qui l'eut cru, la signature de ce traité allait entraîner la France pour des raisons économiques à adhérer à ce protocole le 18 decembre 1826. La France alliée des Turcs et des Anglais, inquiète des visées expensionnistes russes goûta à la madédoine grecque. La Grèce occupée par la Turquie se révolte. La Turquie et son allié l'Égypte écrase la révolte athénienne. Ce qui entraîne l'Angleterre, la France et la Russie à devenir alliés dans le traité du 06 Jul 1827... Ce qui aboutit à la bataille de Navarin gagnée par les Européens malgré leur infériorité numérique et à l'indépendance totale de la Grèce.
1818 The US Congress decides that the flag of the United States will consist of 13 red and white stripes and 20 stars, with a new star to be added for every new state of the Union.
1812 US embargo on trade with England.       ^top^
      President James Madison enacts a ninety-day embargo on trade with England. Madison's embargo was the last in a steady succession of putatively peaceful trade measures; like its predecessors, the embargo was designed to protect America's embattled merchant ships from continued attacks by the British and French (American ships had been under siege since 1807). But, the non-violent nature of Madison's response barely masked his readiness to lead America into battle, especially against the British. Indeed, in November of 1811, the President had urged Congress to cloak the country in "an armor and an attitude demanded by the crisis." Madison's rhetoric was perhaps a bit disingenuous: his willingness to do battle stemmed as much from his desire to usurp British territory in Canada, Spanish Florida and what would become the American West. While expansionists, including Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, licked their chops in anticipation of war, moderate legislators still hoped to forge a more peaceful solution. Though the embargo may have temporarily appeased the moderates, it did little to forestall war: the British refused to cease harassing American ships, prompting Madison to lead America into the War of 1812.
1803 Oncle de Napoléon, le cardinal Fesch est chargé de négocier la venue du pape à Paris pour le sacre de l'empereur. Il est l'ambassadeur de France à Rome.
1795 ( 15 germinal an III) SOUBIRA Joseph, négociant à Puycerda en Catalogne, et RIBÈRE Léandre, négocient de tailtorte en Espagne, domiciliés à Perpignan, département des Pyrénées-Orientales, sont condamnés à mort par contumace, comme distributeurs de faux assignats, par le tribunal criminel dudit département.
1746  Regresa la expedición de José Quiroga, tras recorrer las costas patagónicas. 
1687 English king James II (reigned 1685-88, had become a Roman Catholic, probably as early as 1672) orders all Anglican bishops to read his Declaration of Indulgence (suspending the laws against Catholics and dissenters) from their pulpits. This is met with resistance by seven of the twenty-six bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury: those who refused to read it were thrown into the Tower of London, and immediately became national heroes. Freed after trial, they further inflamed public sentiment against the king.
1660 Declaration of Breda by English king Charles II:       ^top^
      Charles, by the grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c. To all our loving subjects, of what degree or quality soever, greeting.
      If the general distraction and confusion which is spread over the whole kingdom, doth not awaken all men to a desire and longing that those wounds, which have so many years together been kept bleeding, may be bound up, all we can say will be to no purpose; however, after this long silence, we have thought it our duty to declare how much we desire to contribute thereunto; and that as we can never give over the hope, in good time, to obtain the possession of that right which God and nature hath made our due, so we do make it our daily suit to the Divine Providence, that He will, in compassion to us and our subjects, after so long misery and sufferings, remit and put us into a quiet an peaceable possession of that our right, with as little blood and damage to our people as is possible; nor do we desire more to enjoy what is ours, than that all our subjects may enjoy what by law is theirs, by a full and entire administration of justice throughout the land, and by extending our mercy where it is wanted and deserved.
      And to the end that the fear of punishment may not engage any, conscious to themselves of what is past, to a perseverance in guilt for the future, by opposing the quiet and happiness of their country, in the restoration of king, peers and people to their just, ancient and fundamental rights, we do, by these presents, declare, that we do grant a free and general pardon, which we are ready, upon demand, do pass under our Great Seal of England, to all our subjects, of what degree or quality soever, who, within forty days after the publishing hereof, shall lay hold upon this our grace and favor, and shall, by any public act, declare their doing so, and that they return to the loyalty and obedience of good subjects; excepting only such persons as shall hereafter be excepted by Parliament, those only to be excepted...
      And because the passion and uncharitableness of the times have produced several opinions in religion, by which men are engaged in parties and animosities against each other (which, when they shall hereafter unite in a freedom of conversation, will be composed or better understood), we do declare a liberty to tender consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of religion, which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom; and that we shall be ready to consent to such an Act of Parliament, as, upon mature deliberation, shall be offered to us, for the full granting that indulgence.
1655 Battle at Postage Farina, Tunis: English fleet beats Barbarian pirates.
1611  Felipe III, Rey de España, dicta una pragmática suntuaria contra el lujo excesivo en los trajes. 
1588 Christian IV succeeds Frederik II as king of Denmark
1581 Frances Drake completes circumnavigation of world and is knighted.
1558 Czar Ivan IV gives parts of North-Russia to fur traders
1541 Ignatius of Loyola becomes first superior-general of Jesuits
1453  Por orden del Juan II, Rey de Castilla y León, es apresado el condestable de Castilla, don Luna, Álvaro de Luna. 
1284  Sancho IV es nombrado rey de Castilla y León tras la muerte de su padre Alfonso X el Sabio. 
1081 Alexius I Comnenus occupies Byzantine throne
TO THE TOP
KellyDeaths which occurred on a 04 April:
2003 A US soldier and Washington Post reporter Michael Kelly [photo >], when their 3rd Infantry Division Humvee vehicle falls into a canal while trying to evade Iraqi gunfire, near Baghdad, Iraq, in the early pre-dawn hours. Kelly was born on 17 March 1957. He had covered the 1991 Gulf War as a freelancer.
2003 US. Marine 1st Lt. Brian McPhillips, 25, in Iraq as a member of the 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Marine Division.
2003 Spc. Daniel Francis J. Cunningham, 33, and two other soldiers of the US 41st Field Artillery Regiment, when they vehicles falls into a ravine and they drown in the water at the bottom.
2002 Don A. Rooney, 48, suicide by shot in the head. He was assistant pastor at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic parish in Parma, Ohio (diocese of Cleveland) who had just been summoned by the diocesan officials to answer a woman complaint that the priest groped her as a girl in 1980. After his death two other similar allegations surfaced.
1993 Alfred Mosher Butts, 93, US architect. While unemployed during the Depression he decided that, in addition to men-on-a-board (such as chess) and number (cards and dice) games, the world needed a good word game. So he invented Lexiko, which he evolved into Criss-Cross-Words, which was named Scrabble by James Brunot to whom Butts had turned over the marketing of the game. Butts has been impressed by the letter-frequency observations in Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold~Bug, so he adjusted the numbers of the letters in his game to their frequency in written English.
1992 Samuel Reshevsky, 80, Polish-born chess grandmaster.
1991 Senator John Heinz III (R-Pa.) and six others, including two children playing in a schoolyard in Merion, Pennsylvania, into which Heinz's Piper Aerostar 601 crashes together with the Bell helicopter which was making an in-flight inspection of the nose landing gear of the Piper whose underside it strikes with its rotor blades.
1981 Carl Ludwig Siegel, German mathematician born on 31 December 1896. His best work was in number theory, he also contributed to celestial mechanics, and complex analysis.
1979 Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, 51, deposed prime minister of Pakistan, was hanged after he was convicted of conspiring to murder a political opponent.
1975: 155 persons as Operation Baby Lift plane crashes.       ^top^
      A major US airlift of South Vietnamese orphans begins with disaster when an Air Force C-5 Galaxy cargo jet crashes shortly after departing from Tan Son Nhut airbase in Saigon. More than 138 passengers, mostly children, are killed. Operation Baby Lift was designed to bring 2000 South Vietnamese orphans to the United States for adoption by American parents. Baby Lift lasted for 10 days and was carried out during the final, desperate phase of the war, as North Vietnamese forces closed in on Saigon. Although this first flight ended in tragedy, all subsequent flights were completed safely, and Baby Lift aircraft brought orphans across the Pacific until the mission's conclusion on 14 April only 16 days before the fall of Saigon and the end of the war.
1974  Más de 400 muertos por los peores tornados que se recuerdan desde 1925 en EE.UU. 
1973 Un muerto por la intervención de la policía durante las manifestaciones de estudiantes en Barcelona. 
1972 Adam Clayton Powell Jr, (Rep-D-NY) born on 29 November 1908, pioneering US Black politician; congressman (Democrat) for New York City 1944-1970. — Portrait of Powell (1959, 43x61cm; 761x546pix; 164kb) by Bernard Safran
1969  Rómulo Gallegos, presidente de Venezuela y escritor.
Martin Luther King Jr.1968 Martin Luther King, Jr., 39.       ^top^
shot and killed by a sniper while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis TN.
      Two weeks earlier, King had traveled to Memphis in support of a sanitation workers' strike. Violence at the workers' protest march forced his departure, but he vowed to return to the city in early April to lead another demonstration. On 03 April, back in Memphis, King gave his last speech, explaining, "I've been to the mountaintop. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."
     On the night of 04 April, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, just two months away from his own assassination, announced King's death at a political rally in Indianapolis. Urging calm, Kennedy fell into quoting the Ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus in an effort to articulate the inexplicable tragedy of King's murder: "In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." As word of the assassination spread, riots broke out in several major cities, and in Washington, D.C., fires set by enraged protestors devastated portions of the downtown area. The National Guard was subsequently called in, and for several days the armed troops patrolled the streets of the nation's capital.
      On 09 April, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was laid to rest in in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, during a ceremony attended by one hundred thousand people.
—     Martin Luther King Jr. is shot to death at a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. A single shot fired by James Earl Ray [10 Mar 1928 – 23 Apr 1998], from 63 meters away at a boardinghouse across the street, strikes King in the neck. He dies an hour later at St. Joseph's Hospital. The death of America's leading civil rights advocate sparked a wave of rioting in the black communities of several cities around the country. Ray, who had escaped from a Missouri prison almost a year earlier, had used the aliases Eric Galt and John Willard to register in several motels in the Memphis area. He fired a Remington rifle from a bathroom window that looked out onto the hotel balcony where King was standing. Ray fled to Canada, where he stayed for a month. Meanwhile, the FBI placed him on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. After buying a passport under the name Sneyd, Ray traveled to England on 06 May. Within a week of arriving in London, he traveled to Lisbon, Portugal, for five days. Back in London, Ray moved from hotel to hotel until authorities finally caught up with him on 08 June at Heathrow Airport. Ray was a career criminal who was in and out of prison for several small-time robberies. Since he had no known record of political hatred, many suspect that Ray was paid to assassinate King. One factor that has fueled this speculation is that Ray clearly had significant resources during the time between the assassination and his capture. In any event, Ray pleaded guilty before his scheduled trial began in March 1969 and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Ray recanted his confession a few months later and insisted on his innocence for years. However, his efforts to secure a new trial were futile, despite the support of members of the King family who were eager to determine if others were involved. Ray died on 23 April 1998.
     Just after 18:00. on 04 April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Motel Lorraine in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers' strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old. In the months before his assassination, Martin Luther King became increasingly concerned with the problem of economic inequality in America. He planned an interracial "Poor People's March" on Washington and in March 1968 had traveled to Memphis in support of poorly treated African-American sanitation workers. On 28 March, a workers' protest march led by King ended in violence and the death of an African-American teenager. King left the city but vowed to return in early April to lead another demonstration. On 03 April, back in Memphis, King gave his last sermon, saying, "We've got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land."
      One day after speaking those words, Dr. King is shot and killed by a sniper. As word of the assassination spread, riots broke out in cities all across the United States and National Guard troops were deployed in Memphis and Washington, D.C. On 09 April, King was laid to rest in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to pay tribute to King's casket as it passed by in a wooden farm cart drawn by a single mule. The evening of King's murder, a Remington .30-06 hunting rifle was found on the sidewalk beside a rooming house one block from the Lorraine Motel. During the next several weeks, the rifle, eyewitness reports, and fingerprints on the weapon all implicated a single suspect: escaped convict James Earl Ray. A two-bit criminal, Ray escaped a Missouri prison in April 1967 while serving a sentence for a holdup. In May 1968, a massive manhunt for Ray began. The FBI eventually determined that he had obtained a Canadian passport under a false identity, which at the time was relatively easy. On 08 June, Scotland Yard investigators arrested Ray at a London airport. He was trying to fly to Belgium, with the eventual goal, he later admitted, of reaching Rhodesia. Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, was at the time ruled by an oppressive and internationally condemned white minority government. Extradited to the United States, Ray stood before a Memphis judge in March 1969 and pleaded guilty to King's murder in order to avoid the electric chair. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.
      Three days later, he attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming he was innocent of King's assassination and had been set up as a patsy in a larger conspiracy. He claimed that in 1967, a mysterious man named Raoul had approached him and recruited him into a gunrunning enterprise. On 04 April 1968, he said, he realized that he was to be the fall guy for the King assassination and fled to Canada. Ray's motion was denied, as were his dozens of other requests for a trial during the next 29 years. During the 1990s, the widow and children of Martin Luther King Jr. spoke publicly in support of Ray and his claims, calling him innocent and speculating about an assassination conspiracy involving the US government and military. US authorities were, in conspiracists' minds, implicated circumstantially. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover [01 Jan 1895 – 02 May 1972] hated King and believed that he had to be destroyed. In one widely publicized interview, Hoover called King “one of the lowest characters in the country” and a “notorious liar” who was controlled by Communist agents [Hoover himself would better be described in those terms, except that he was out of control.].
     For the last six years of his life, King underwent constant wiretapping and harassment by the FBI. Before his death, Dr. King was also monitored by US military intelligence, which may have been asked to watch King after he publicly denounced the Vietnam War in 1967. Furthermore, by calling for radical economic reforms in 1968, including guaranteed annual incomes for all, King was making few new friends in the Cold War-era US government.
      Over the years, the assassination has been reexamined by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the Shelby County, Tennessee, district attorney's office, and three times by the US Justice Department. The investigations all ended with the same conclusion: James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. The House committee acknowledged that a low-level conspiracy might have existed, involving one or more accomplices to Ray, but uncovered no evidence to definitively prove this theory. In addition to the mountain of evidence against him — such as his fingerprints on the murder weapon and his admitted presence at the rooming house on 04 April — Ray had a definite motive in assassinating King: hatred. According to his family and friends, he was an outspoken racist who informed them of his intent to kill Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
1953 Carol II, born on 15 October 1893, King of Romania (8 Jun 1930 - 06 Sep 1940). The eldest son of King Ferdinand I, Carol became crown prince upon the October 1914 death of his great uncle, King Carol I. His domestic life was a constant source of scandal, marked as it was by a morganatic marriage with an officer's daughter, Zizi Lambrino; a second unhappy marriage to Helen, daughter of King Constantine I [02 Aug 1868 – 11 Jan 1923] of Greece; and a continuing liaison with a Jewish adventuress, Magda Lupescu [1896 – 28 Jun 1977], an affair that finally obliged him to renounce his rights to the throne and go into exile in 1925. Although he was officially excluded from the Romanian succession by an act of January 1926, as well as by his father's will, he returned in 1930 and replaced the regency that had governed for his young son Michael [25 Oct 1921~], taking the royal oath on 08 June 1930. Flamboyant and energetic, an admirer of the authoritarian methods of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini [29 Jul 1883 – 28 Apr 1945], he gradually undermined the already uncertain bases of Romanian democracy; and in February 1938, to counter the growing political menace of the chief national Fascist group, the Iron Guard, he proclaimed a corporatist dictatorship. In December 1938, to supplant the then disbanded political parties and provide a program of social reform, he established the Frontul Renasterii Nationale with himself as head. After Romania was divested of territory in Transylvania, Dobrogea, Bukovina, and Bessarabia by the Axis powers and the Soviet Union during World War II, he was forced to abdicate (06 Sep 1940) in favor of his son Michael and once again seek exile. He married Lupescu in July 1947.
1951 George Albert Smith, Salt Lake City, Utah, on his 81st birthday.
1939 Ghazi I, King of Iraq (19??-39), in car accident.
1937  Muley Hafiz, emir de Marruecos.
1933:: 73 of 77 aboard US dirigible Akron which crashes off coast of NJ.
1931 André Michelin, born in 1853, CEO of Compagnie Générale des Établissements Michelin, leading French manufacturer of tires and other rubber products, which he founded in 1888 together with his brother Édouard Michelin [1869-1940].
1929 Karl Friedrich Benz, 84, automobile engineer, inventor of the first car with a gasoline motor (Mercedes)
1925 Walter William Rouse Ball, English mathematician and historian of mathematics, born on 14 August 1850. Author of A short history of mathematics (1888), and Mathematical Recreations and Essays (1892).
1923 John Venn, English mathematician born on 04 August 1834. He developed Boole's mathematical logic and invented the Venn diagram. Author of Symbolic Logic (1881), The Principles of Empirical Logic (1889), The Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College 1349-1897 (1897).
1904 Frederik Hendrik Kaemmerer (or Kammerer), Dutch artist born in 1839.
1895  Frederic Soler y Hubert, escritor español. 
1871 Peter Heinrich Lambert von Hess, German artist born on 29 July 1792.
1841 William Henry Harrison, US President for one month.       ^top^
     Only one month after assuming office, William Henry Harrison, the ninth President of the United States, dies of pneumonia at the White House, the first US president to die in office.
      Born in Charles County, Virginia, on 09 February 1773, Harrison served in the US Army in the old Northwest Territory, and in 1800 was made governor of the Indian Territory, where he proved an able administrator. In 1811, he led US forces against an Indian confederation organized by Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, and with victory at the Battle of Tippecanoe ended Tecumseh's hopes for a united Indian front against US expansion.
      During the War of 1812, Harrison gained his greatest fame as a military commander, recapturing Detroit from the British and defeating a combined force of British and Amerindians at the Battle of the Thames. In 1816, he was elected to the House of Representatives, and in 1825, to the Senate. Gaining the Whig presidential nomination in 1840, he and his running mate, John Tyler, ran a successful campaign under the slogan, "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too."
      At Harrison's inauguration, the US's first Whig president, on 04 March 1841, a bitterly cold day, he declined to wear a jacket or hat, made a two-hour speech, and attended three inauguration balls. Soon afterwards, he developed pneumonia. On 04 April, President Harrison dies in Washington DC, and Vice President John Tyler ascends to the presidency, becoming the first person in US history to reach the office through the death of a president.
1814 Thomas-Germain-Joseph Duvivier, French artist born on 30 August 1735.
1807 Joseph Jérôme Le Francais de Lalande, French astronomer.
1803 Jacob-Henri Sablet “du Soleil”, Swiss French painter, draftsman, and printmaker, born on 28 January 1749. — more
1774 Oliver Goldsmith, 43, Irish novelist (The Vicar of Wakefield, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Vicar of Wakefield), playwright (She Stoops to Conquer), and poet (The Deserted VillageThe Rising Village, With Other Poems). He was born on 10 November 1730. GOLDSMITH ONLINE:
1794 DABADIE D'ESPAUNIC Bernard, guillotiné mourant.       ^top^
Né en 1736 a HAGETMAU 40, chevalier de St Louis, habitait lieu dit Pessabathe a DOAZIT 40, avait une résidence a ST SEVER 40. Il fut implique dans l'affaire de SAMADET 40. Un huissier de SAMADET. Arnaud DUMARTIN aurait adressé à l’abbé JUNCAROT, émigré en ESPAGNE, une lettre dans laquelle il invite les espagnols a profiter du désordre qui règne dans l’armée française pour passer a l'attaque. A la découverte de ce complot on pense que la Chalosse est a la veille d'un soulèvement, on parle même de nouvelle Vendée. La guillotine est dresses sur la place du Tour du Sol a ST SEVER 40 Il fut compromis par des lettres jugées contre révolutionnaires trouvées a son domicile, '' Desquelles il résulte que le dit DABBADIE-DESPONIC etoit un de ceux qui formoient la compagnie des chevaliers du Poignard". Pour ne pas comparaître devant le Tribunal Révolutionnaire, il se jeta d'une fenêtre de la prison un rasoir a la main "ce qui prouve combien il etait criminel'', et se donna deux coups de lame a la gorge. Il fut néanmoins juge et condamne a mort. ''DESPAUNICQ avait inondé de son sang le trajet de la prison a l’échafaud, et probablement ce n’était plus qu'un cadavre lorsque le bourreau fit tomber se tête" .
1794 (15 germinal an II) Condamnés à mort par la Révolution:       ^top^
et, présumément, guillotinés (ou fusillés?) le même jour ou très peu après:
  1. DILLON Pierre, domicilié à Bouguenais, canton de Nantes, département de la Loire-Inféreure, comme brigand de la Vendée, par la commission militaire séante à Nantes.
  2. d'ARCHE Jean François, ex-noble, domicilié à Felletin, département de la Creuze, comme conspirateur, par le tribunal criminel du dit département.
  3. BECOURT Jean François, âgé de 43 ans, né à Ayette et y demeurant, époux de Savary Marie Joseph, condamné à mort à Arras.
  4. CLAVERIE Antoine, sous lieutenant du 7ème bataillon de Lot et Garonne, domicilié à Chauvin-Dragon, par le tribunal militaire du premier arrondissement de l'armée des Pyrénées Orientales, séant à Chauvin-Dragon, département des Basses-Pyrénées.
  5. LACROIX Michel, volontaire au 3ème bataillon de l'Hérault, domicilié à Laurenard, département de l'Ariège, comme déserteur, par le tribunal militaire du 1er arrondissement de l'armée des Pyrénées-Orientales.
  6. et 8. LOUIS Nicolas et LOUIS Michel, tisserands, domiciliés à Faulquemont, département de la Moselle, comme séditieux, par le tribunal criminel dudit département.
1794 (15 germinal an II) Condamnés à mort ,       ^top^
et, présumément, guillotinés (ou fusillés?) le même jour ou très peu après.
par la commission militaire séante à Granville, comme contre-révolutionnaires, domiciliés à Tirpied, canton d'Avranches, département de la Manche:
  1. ALLAIN Pierre, charpentier
  2. BELLET Jean, laboureur
  3. BOUFEY Nicolas Gabriel, laboureur et officier municipal
  4. DUFOUR Jean, domestique du curé
  5. PEPIN François, maréchal et greffier du juge de Paix
1794 (15 germinal an II) Condamnés à mort ,       ^top^
et, présumément, guillotinés (ou fusillés?) le même jour ou très peu après.
par le tribunal criminel du département du Gard,, comme conspirateurs, domiciliés dans le département du Gard:
  1. BELLE Caflor, imprimeur, domicilié à Nismes
  2. CARDONNET Jacques Joseph, cultivateur, domicilié à St Jean-du-Gard
  3. COLOMB Marc Antoine, propriétaire foncier, domicilié à Nismes
  4. GRIOLET Jean Antoine, homme de loi, domicilié à Nismes
  5. IDALOT Joseph, agriculteur, domicilié à Nismes.
  6. PRIOLET Jean Antoine, père, homme de loi, domicilié à Nismes.
1794 (15 germinal an II) Condamnés à mort ,       ^top^
et, présumément, guillotinés (ou fusillés?) le même jour ou très peu après.
par le tribunal criminel des Bouches du Rhône:
  1. comme émigré: ISNARD François, charcutier, domicilié à Marseille, département des Bouches du Rhône
    comme contre-révolutionnaires, domiciliés dans le département des Bouches du Rhône:
          domiciliés à Marseille:
  2. IMBERT Nicolas, capitaine en second
  3. ROUX César Ignace, commis des domaines nationaux
  4. VIAN P. Barthelemi, ex religieux
  5.       domiciliés à Auriol:
  6. MASSE Jean Baptiste, marchand toilier, et officier municipal
  7. VELLIN Jean Joseph Chrysostôme, propriétaire, et officier municipal
  8.       domicilié à Aix: ROUX Charles Benoît, ex évêque
  9. comme contre-révolutionnaire, domicilié à Mouriez, département de Vaucluse: VERPIAN Pierre, cultivateur

    comme fédéralistes, domiciliés dans le département des Bouches du Rhône:
          domiciliés à Marseille:
  10. BONTOUX Claude, propriétaire
  11. THOMAS Pierre Paul, lieutenant des douanes
  12. YVAN Henry, propriétaire
          domiciliés à Roquevaire:
  13. MASSE Joseph, expert vérificateur
  14. POUTET Louis, propriétaire
  15. TREMELAT Joseph, cultivateur propriétaire.
  16. comme fédéraliste, domicilié à Barjols, département du Var: SUZANNE Jean Baptiste, faïencier et cartier

  17. PEIRIER Lazare (dit Meynard), courtier, domicilié à Marseille, département des Bouches du Rhône, comme fédéraliste, par la commission militaire dudit département.
1793 THOUZEAU Pierre, laboureur domicilié à Genetouze, d'épatement de la Vendée, condamné à mort comme brigand de la Vendée, par commission militaire séante aux Sables.
1793 HOUIX François, menuisier, marchand de drap, domicilié à Rocgefort, département du Morbihan, condamné à mort, comme contre-révolutionnaire, par le tribunal criminel dudit département.
1737 Henri-Joseph Antonissen, Flemish artist born on 09 June 1737.
1708 Louis-Antoine de Noailles, cardinal and archbishop of Paris, according to prediction by Jonathan Swift in Predictions for the year 1708 by Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. In fact cardinal de Noailles died on 04 May 1729.
1669 Adam Willaerts, Dutch painter born in 1577. MORE ON WILLAERTS AT ART “4” APRIL with links to images
1633 Pieter Pieterszoon Lastman, Dutch artist born in 1583. MORE ON LASTMAN AT ART “4” APRIL with links to images
1617 John Napier, Scottish estate owner, fanatical Protestant theologian, mathematician as a hobby, born in 1550. He is best known for his invention of the first logarithms. His other mathematical contributions include a mnemonic for formulas used in solving spherical triangles, two formulas known as Napier's analogies used in solving spherical triangles, and “Napier's Bones” (precursor to the slide rule) for mechanically multiplying, dividing, and calculating square roots and cube roots. Napier also found exponential expressions for trigonometric functions, and introduced the decimal notation for fractions. Author of Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593, virulently anti-Papist), Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio (1614), Rabdologiae (1617).
1588 Frederik II, 53. King of Denmark/Norway (1559-88)
1406 Robert III, King of Scotland (1390-1406)
1292 Nicholas IV, [Girolamo Masci], Pope (1288-92)
1284 Alfonso X, "El Sabio", 62, King of Castilla/León (1252-84)
0896 Formosus, 80, Pope (from September 891)

0636 Saint Isidore, 76, bishop of Seville       ^top^
      He lived in an age when little ancient science was remembered in Europe. He collected that lore into his twenty volume Originum seu Etymologiarum libri XX (also called De rerum natura, On the Nature of Things), a careful encyclopedia said to show real organizational improvement over Pliny's. So popular was it that portions of over one thousand copies remain extant now some fourteen hundred years later.
       The Originum was the labor of many years. It was amassed in spite of the heavy spiritual and administrative duties placed upon him after he became archbishop in 599, the year his older brother, Leander, who had held the post, died. The first Christian work of its kind in Spain, parts circulated before his death. Interestingly, Isidore showed none of the narrowness characteristic of Spain in a later age.
      The Originum does not start from theology as did many other Medieval encyclopedias. On the contrary, Isidore considered liberal arts and secular learning the foundation for Christian education. In one of his writings, Regula Monachorum, he envisioned the ideal monastic community as including a library complete with secular works, although he says it would be better to be without the knowledge in such books than to be misled by their heretical contents. He borrowed freely from the pagans, especially from Latin sources. His Christian sources included the innovators Boethius and Augustine of Hippo. Isidore defended Christianity against the Jews and defended Christ's divinity against Arianism.
       Isidore wrote little that was original, content to glean the labors of the past, enough of a job for any man in his position. Nonetheless his work is considered useful, especially to those seeking the technical meanings of Latin terms. Its science holds nothing new, sharing with alchemists a belief in the existence of four fundamental qualities: coldness, dryness, wetness and hotness. Dealing with scriptural numbers in Liber numerorum, he became mystical and fanciful. One section of his work was devoted to medicine and gave monks some healing knowledge.
       At root of Isidore's concern for science was his desire to reform the church through discipline and the establishment of schools. His textbooks exerted considerable influence in the centuries to come. Rhabanus Maurus, for example, drew heavily on Isidore's work in preparing his own. In England, The Venerable Bede consulted him and Aldhelm cited him.
       Isidore was educated by Leander and in the schools of the monks. The thinking of the day was largely analogical rather than analytical. Isidore imbibed this view with all its limitations. His work demonstrates the very high sense of responsibility many theologians have exhibited toward the preservation of learning. Without Isidore's efforts, the Medieval world would have been much poorer of knowledge. The Originum, incomplete at his death on this date 04 April, in the year 636, was edited and issued by his friend and disciple Bishop Braulio.

0397 (Good Friday) Saint Ambrose, 57, lawyer, governor of Liguria and Æmilia, unexpectedly named bishop of Milan in 374 by popular acclamation started by a child. Doctor of the Church, for his exegetical, dogmatic, ascetico-moral, and occasional writings, which include Exposition in Lucam, De Officiis ministrorum, De Virginibus, De Penitentia, De Sacramento Regenerationis, De Mysteriis, Contra Auxentium de basilicis tradendis, and many others.
Births which occurred on an April 04:
^ 1996 Jaguar SK8 convertible car.
      Jaguar introduces its new SK8 convertible at the New York International Auto Show. The SK was the sports car version of the XK car released a few months before. The two models were Jaguar's first entirely new designs since the company became a Ford subsidiary in 1989. Powered by the advanced Jaguar V-8 coupled with a five-speed automatic gearbox, the SK lives up to Jaguar's historic line of powerful sports cars. However, Jaguar purists argue that the lines of the car body itself are not Jaguar lines. Ford executives claim that they have not meddled with the integrity of the distinctive Jaguar look, and so any lines that don't appear to have come from Jaguar designs still came from Jaguar designers. Judge for yourself: would Sir William Lyons have approved of Jaguar's new look?
1994 Mosaic Communications is founded, the future Netscape Communications.
1967  Daniel Múgica, escritor español.
1949 Shing-Tung Yau, Chinese-born US mathematician who has worked on differential geometry and partial differential equations.
1949 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization       ^top^
     (NATO) is established by twelve Western democracies — the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Iceland, and Canada — as a safeguard against the threat of Soviet aggression. The US-dominated military alliance greatly increases American influence in Western Europe, and also leads to the establishment of the Warsaw Pact, a Soviet-led Eastern European military alliance, in 1955.
      In 1952, Greece and Turkey joined NATO, followed by West Germany in 1955. In 1965, France withdrew from the alliance, citing increasing US domination in violation of the 1949 treaty. With the end of the Cold War, NATO members approved the use of its military forces for peacekeeping missions in countries outside the alliance; in 1994, the organization agreed to enforce U.N. resolutions enacted to end the bloody conflict in the former Yugoslavia. In 1994 and 1995, in the first actions in its forty-five-year history, NATO planes enforced the no-fly zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina, and struck at Bosnian Serb military positions and airfields on a number of occasions. On 20 December 1995, NATO began the mass deployment of 60'000 troops to enforce the Dayton peace accords, signed in Paris by the belligerent parties of the former Yugoslavia six days before.
     1949 NATO pact signed The United States and 11 other nations establish the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact aimed at containing possible Soviet aggression against Western Europe. NATO stood as the main US-led military alliance against the Soviet Union throughout the duration of the Cold War. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union began to deteriorate rapidly in 1948. There were heated disagreements over the postwar status of Germany, with the Americans insisting on German recovery and eventual rearmament and the Soviets steadfastly opposing such actions. In June 1948, the Soviets blocked all ground travel to the American occupation zone in West Berlin, and only a massive US airlift of food and other necessities sustained the population of the zone until the Soviets relented and lifted the blockade in May 1949. In January 1949, President Harry S. Truman warned in his State of the Union Address that the forces of democracy and communism were locked in a dangerous struggle, and he called for a defensive alliance of nations in the North Atlantic — NATO was the result. In April 1949, representatives from Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal joined the United States in signing the NATO agreement. The signatories agreed, "An armed attack against one or more of them ... shall be considered an attack against them all." President Truman welcomed the organization as "a shield against aggression." Not everyone in the US embraced NATO. Isolationists such as Senator Robert A. Taft declared that NATO was "not a peace program; it is a war program." Most, however, saw the organization as a necessary response to the communist threat. The U. S. Senate ratified the treaty by a wide margin in June 1949. During the next few years, Greece, Turkey, and West Germany also joined. The Soviet Union condemned NATO as a warmongering alliance and responded by setting up the Warsaw Pact (a military alliance between the Soviet Union and its Eastern Europe satellites) in 1955. NATO lasted throughout the course of the Cold War, and continues to play an important role in post-Cold War Europe. In recent years, for example, NATO forces were active in trying to bring an end to the civil war in Bosnia.
1945  Daniel Cohn-Bendit, “Dany le Rouge”, dirigente estudiantil del mayo francés
1941  Jaime Lamo de Espinosa, político español. 
1935  Raúl Fernández Garrido, escritor español. 
1924 Conchita la limpia, de los hermanos Serafín y Joaquín Quintero, se estrena en el teatro Lara de Madrid.
1914 Marguerite Duras, French novelist, screenwriter, playwright and director. She died on 03 March 1914.
1896 Robert E. Sherwood, US playwright who died on 14 November 1955.
1884 Isoroku Yamamoto Isoroku, mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack.       ^top^
      Isoroku Yamamoto would grow up to be perhaps Japan's greatest strategist and to plan the surprise air attack on US naval forces at Pearl Harbor. A graduate of the Japanese naval academy in 1904, Yamamoto worked as a naval attaché for the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., from 1926 to 1927. During the next 15 years, he saw several promotions, from vice minister of the Japanese navy to commander in chief of Japan's Combined Fleet in August 1941. Despite worsening Japanese-American relations (especially in light of Japan's alliance with Germany and Italy), Yamamoto initially opposed war with the US, mostly out of fear that a prolonged conflict would go badly for Japan.
      But once the government of Prime Minister Tojo Hideki decided on war, Yamamoto argued that only a surprise attack aimed at crippling US naval forces in the Pacific had any hope of victory. He also predicted that if war with America lasted more than one year, Japan would lose. Yamamoto meticulously planned and carried out the Japanese air strike on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on Oahu Island, Hawaii, on 07 December 1941. Waves of dive bombers, torpedo planes, and fighters descended on US battleships, capsizing, destroying, or immobilizing several US battleships within the first 30 minutes of the raid. The attack was a decided success, especially in catching the United States off guard, and resulted in the destruction of 180 US aircraft and more than 3400 American casualties.
      US forces finally caught up with Yamamoto, though, when they ambushed his plane and shot him down over Bougainville Island on 18 April 1943. Yamamoto died having been right about two things: the effectiveness of aircraft carriers in long-range naval attacks and that Japan would lose a drawn-out struggle with the United States. Yamamoto was portrayed by Toshiro Mifune, an Akira Kurosawa regular, in three films, I Bombed Pearl Harbor (1961), Admiral Yamamoto (1968), and Midway (1974).
1883 Albert Servaes, Belgian painter who died on 19 April 1966. — more
1882 Emil Filla, Czech painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and collector, who died on 07 (06?) October 1953. — more
1878 Henri Liénard de Saint-Délis, French painter who died on 15 November 1949. — more with link to an image.
1876 Maurice de Vlaminck, French Fauvist painter who died on 10 October 1958. MORE ON VLAMINCK AT ART “4” APRIL with links to images.
1870 George Albert Smith, Salt Lake City, Utah, 8th president (from 21 May 1945) of Mormon Church, who died on his 81st birthday. Not to be confused with George Albert Smith [26 Jun 1817 – 01 Sep 1875], First Counselor (from Oct 1868) to the Mormons' 2nd president, Brigham Young [01 Jun 1801 – 29 Aug 1877].
1857 Diego Mendoza Pérez, político y escritor colombiano.
1845 Jesús Posada Moreno, político español.
1843 William Jackson, painter, Yellowstone photographer, in Keeseville, New York. Thanks in no small part to Jackson's photos, on 01 March 1872, the US Congress established 4944 square kilometers of the Yellowstone area as the world's first national park.
1842 François-Edouard-Anatole Lucas, French mathematician who died on 03 October 1891. He is best known for his work in number theory. He gave this formula for the nth Fibonacci number F(n): Sqr(5)*F(n)= ([1 + Sqr(5)]/2)^n – ([1 – Sqr(5)]/2)^n. Named after him are the associated Lucas sequences, of which some special cases are the Fibonacci numbers, the Lucas numbers: L(n) = F(n – 1) + F(n + 1), the Pell numbers, the Jacobsthal numbers; and on which are based the Sylvester cyclotomic numbers.
1826- Zénobe Théophile Gramme, inventor (electric motor)
^ 1823 Karl Wilhelm Siemens, Prussian-born English engineer and inventor, important in the development of the steel and telegraph industries, who died on 19 November 1883. After immigrating to England in 1844, he changed his given names to Charles William.
Siemens in 1865      After private tutoring, Siemens was sent to a commercial school at Lübeck in order to enter his uncle's bank. But his elder brother, Werner Siemens [13 Dec 1816 – 06 Dec 1892], deciding that engineering was more suitable, sent him to a technical school at Magdeburg for three years. Financed by his uncle, he then studied chemistry, physics, and mathematics for a year at the University of Göttingen, where his brother-in-law was a professor of chemistry. Through his brother's influence he became an apprentice-student, without fee, in an engineering factory making steam engines in Magdeburg. While there, he determined to sell Werner's electroplating process; after modest success in Hamburg, William traveled to London, arriving in March 1843 with only afew pounds in cash. He sold the process to Elkingtons of Birmingham for £1600. He returned to Germany to complete his studies and then went again to England in February 1844 with the intention of selling further inventions.
      Finding that the patent laws in England were encouraging, William boldly decided to settle there as an inventor, but he found it difficult to make a living until his water meter, invented in1851, began to earn large royalties. He could now afford an office in London and a house in Kensington, where he lived with his younger brothers, Carl Siemens [1829–1906] and August Friedrich Siemens [1826–1904], until his marriage in 1859 to Anne Gordon, the sister of an engineering professorat the University of Glasgow. The same year, he also received British citizenship.
      Beginning in 1847, William and his brother Friedrich had attempted to apply to industrial processes the regenerative principle, by which heat escaping with waste gases was captured to heat the air supplied to a furnace, thus increasing efficiency. In 1861 William used this principle in his patent for the open-hearth furnace that was heated by gas produced by low-grade coal outside the furnace. This invention, first used in glassmaking, was soon widely applied in steelmaking and eventually supplanted the earlier Bessemer process of 1856. By the end of the 19th century more steel was produced by the Siemens method than any other. William's achievements were recognized by his membership in the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1860 and by his election as a fellow of the Royal Society in 1862. Tempted by the prospect of profits as well as royalties, he started his own steelworks at Landore, South Wales, in 1869; but, although it flourished for some years, he was losing money by the 1880s.
      Meanwhile, he had made yet another reputation and fortune in electric telegraphy. Beginning in 1850, he had acted as English agent for his brother Werner's firm, Siemens & Halske of Berlin, a connection he maintained until 1858, when he became managing partner of the separate London firm founded under the same name; the firm was engaged in electrical testing for cable firms and in the manufacturing of apparatus. The English firm laid, in 1874, the electrical cable from Rio de Janeiro to Montevideo and, in 1875, the first direct link from Britain to the United States. Siemens & Halske and other later Siemens companies merged on 01 October 1966 to form Siemens AG, one of the world's largest electrical equipment manufacturers.
      Thereafter, William worked on electric lighting and electric traction. He invented improvements in arc lights and had them installed in the British Museum and elsewhere. A few months before he died he was responsible for the Portrush electric railway in Northern Ireland. He played a full part in professional life: he acted as president of various professional organizations including the British Association for the Advancement of Science, received honorary degrees from various universities and many foreign orders, and was knighted in the year of his death. He left a large fortune but no children.
1809 Benjamin Peirce, US mathematician and astronomer who died on 06 October 1880. Author of Linear Associative Algebra (1870)
1802 Dorothea Dix, US social reformer and humanitarian who aroused interest in treatment of mental inmates. She died on 17 July 1887. [same birth and death dates as White 1748-1836. but lived 3 years less]
1792 Thaddeus Stevens, US Radical Republican congressional leader (Rep-R), who died on 11 August 1868.
1780 Edward Hicks, US Folk artist who died on 23 August 1849, specialized in Animals. MORE ON HICKS AT ART “4” APRIL with links to images
1777 Antoine Patrice Guyot, French artist who died on 1845.
1758 Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, French Neoclassical painter French painter and draftsman known for his softly modeled, emotionally Romantic style, who died on 16 February 1823. MORE ON PRUD'HON AT ART “4” APRIL with links to images
1758 John Hoppner, English painter who died on 23 January 1810. MORE ON HOPPNER AT ART “4” APRIL with links to images
1748 William White, US religious leader; first presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He died on 17 July 1836. [same birth and death dates as Dix 1802-1887. but lived 3 years more]
1664 Gaspar Peeter Verbruggen II, Flemish artist who died on 14 March 1730. — more with link to an image.
1623 Gillis Neyts, Flemish draftsman, painter, and etcher, who died in 1687. — more
0188 Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus “Caracalla, Roman emperor (211-217) who died in 217.
Santoral:: Santos Benito de Palermo, Platón y Zósimo.
Holy Thursday in 1901, 1912, 1985, 1996, 2075, 2080.
Good Friday in 0397, 1890, 1947, 1958, 1969, 1980, 2042, 2053, 2064, 2110, 2121.
Easter Sunday in 1915, 1920, 1926, 1999, 2010, 2021, 2083, 2094.

Thoughts for the day:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”Martin Luther King Jr.
“Injustice everywhere is the norm in history.”
“In justice anywhere there is a threat to injustice everywhere.”

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