Today in history
1528 - Pope Clement VII establishes commission to determine validity of King Henry VIII’S marriage to Catherine of Aragon in England.
1742 - George Frederick Handel conducts first performance of his Messiah in Dublin.
1870 - The Metropolitan Museum of Art is founded in New York.
1919 - In Amritsar massacre, British troops shoot nearly 380 of Gandhi’s followers.
1945 - Vienna, the first foreign capital to be occupied by Hitler, is liberated by the Russians.
1961 - United Nations General Assembly condemns South African apartheid.
1964 - Sidney Poitier becomes the first black man to win the best-actor Oscar, for his role in Lilies Of The Field.
1970 - James Lovell, leader of the Apollo 13 mission that is four-fifths of the way to the moon, reports: ‘‘Houston, we’ve had a problem’’ after a tank of liquid oxygen explodes. The three-man crew reaches Earth safely four days later.
1986 - Stampede by Hindu pilgrims kills at least 46 people and injures 39 others at religious festival along the Ganges River northeast of New Delhi, India.
1990 - Soviet Union admits for the first time its responsibility for the 1940 massacre of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn, Poland.
1997 - United States golfer Tiger Woods becomes the youngest person to win the Masters tournament and the first player of African-american heritage to claim a major golf title.
1999 - A US judge sentences assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian to 10 to 25 years in prison following his second-degree murder conviction.
2005 - Eric Rudolph pleads guilty to carrying out the deadly bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and three other attacks.
2009 - The Obama administration lifts restrictions on Cuban-americans who want to travel and send money to their island homeland.
2015 - A US federal judge sentences a former Blackwater security guard to life in prison and three others to 30-year terms for their roles in a 2007 shooting in Baghdad that killed 14 Iraqi civilians and wounded 17 others.
Today’s Birthdays:
Guy Fawkes, English conspirator (1570-1606); Thomas Jefferson, US president (1743-1826); Frank Winfield Woolworth, US retailer (1852-1919); Butch Cassidy, US outlaw (1866-1908); Samuel Beckett, Irish writer (1906-1989); Don Adams, US actor (1923-2005); Alan Jones, Australian radio personality (1941-); Christopher Hitchens, British-us journalist, critic, and author (1949-2011); Garry Kasparov, Russian chess champion (1963-).