On
a 19 April: 2003 Presidential election in Nigeria. President Olusegun Obasanjo [12 Apr 2003 photo >], who came to power through a military-rigged election in 1999, thanks to widespread fraud, wins 2-to-1 over the other 19 candidates. Steve Hodel He might have won, more narrowly, without fraud, but he and his supporters wanted to be sure.
2002 Catholic Bishop Jerzy Mazur, a Pole who has been leading a diocese in eastern Siberia since 1998, is declared persona non grata by Russia after being stopped when he flew into Moscow from Warsaw. The Russian government espouses the anti-Catholic stance of the Russian Orthodox Church.
2002 In Montenegro, Prime Minister Filip Vujanovic asks parliament to accept his resignation, blaming unsuccessful attempts to preserve a coalition government. The previous week, four of the pro-independence ministers, including Foreign Minister Branko Lukovac, resigned to protest an accord, brokered in March 2002 by the European Union, signed by President Milo Djukanovic and Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, and endorsed by both parliaments, which would restructure Yugoslavia under the name “Serbia and Montenegro”. The agreement allows the republics to vote on full independence in three years, meanwhile they would share defense and foreign policies and a seat at the United Nations but maintain separate economies, currencies and customs services, which is too little and too late for Montenegrin independentists. Yugoslavia, former four other republics; Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia, broke away — most of them violently — under then-President of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s.
Deaths
Just after 09:00 central time, a massive truck bomb explodes outside the
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The blast
collapsed the north face of the nine-story building, instantly killing over
a hundred people, trapping dozens more in the rubble, and injuring some
500. Emergency crews raced to Oklahoma City from across the country, and
when the rescue effort finally ended two weeks later, the death toll stood
at 168 people killed, including nineteen infants and young children who
were in the building's day care center at the time of the blast. [photo:
Baylee Almon's corpse, carried out by fireman >]
1919
At about 05:00, several hundred British soldiers, on a mission to
capture Patriot leaders and seize a Patriot arsenal, marched into
Lexington to find about seventy armed minutemen under Captain John
Parker waiting for them on the town's common green. British Major
John Pitcairn ordered the outnumbered Patriots to disperse, and after
a moment's hesitation the Americans began to drift off the green.
Suddenly, the "shot heard around the world" was fired from an undetermined
gun, and a cloud of musket smoke soon covered the green. When the
brief Battle of Lexington ended, eight Americans lay dead or dying
and ten others were wounded. Only one British soldier was injured,
but the US War of Independence had begun. By 1775, tensions between
the American colonies and the British government had reached the breaking
point, especially in Massachusetts, where Patriot leaders formed a
shadow revolutionary government and trained militias to prepare for
armed conflict with the British troops occupying Boston.
When the British troops arrived at Lexington, Adams, Hancock, and
Revere had already fled to Philadelphia, and a group of militiamen
were waiting.[photo 1: Re-enactors, playing the part of American
colonists, tend to a fallen Minuteman on the Lexington Green 000415].
The Patriots were routed within minutes, but the first shots of the
American Revolution had been fired, leading to calls to arms across
the Massachusetts countryside.
