Now & Then
◆ 3 APRIL
1721: Robert Walpole became Britain’s first prime minister, an office he held until February 1742. 1882: Jesse James, American outlaw and robber, was murdered, shot in the back while adjusting a picture on his cabin wall. The killer was his cousin, Robert Ford.
1902: Tarmacadam was patented by Edgar Hooley.
1913: Emmeline Pankhurst, suffragette, was found guilty of inciting supporters to place explosives at the London residence of David Lloyd George. She was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. The Home Secretary banned all future public meetings of suffragettes.
1921: Coal rationing was imposed in Britain.
1922: Josef Stalin was appointed general secretary of the Communist Party in Russia.
1930: Ras Tafari became Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). He ruled for 44 years. 1933: Two British aeroplanes became the first to fly over Mount Everest.
1947: Bupa, the private medical company, was founded.
1978: The first regular BBC radio broadcasts of proceedings in parliament began.
1982: MPS held an emergency Saturday Commons session on the Falklands crisis as the United Nations Security Council voted 10-1 for resolution demanding withdrawal of Argentine forces, who took the island of South Georgia the same day.
1991: United Nations Security Council voted 12-1 to accept a ceasefire resolution requiring Iraq to destroy its weapons of mass destruction and authorising peacekeeping troops to be deployed in the region.
1992: Actor-pop star Jason Donovan was awarded £200,000 libel damages over magazine article which wrongly suggested he was gay.
1993: Grand National was declared void for the first time in its history after two false starts when the starting tape failed to rise properly.
1995: High Court in Edinburgh banned BBC from screening a Panorama interview with John Major in Scotland in the run-up to the local elections after protests from the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats.
2000: Microsoft was ruled to have violated United States anti-trust laws by keeping “an oppressive thumb” on its competitors.
2004: Islamic terrorists involved in the 11 March (2004) Madrid attacks were trapped by the police in their apartment and killed themselves.
2007: A French TGV train on the LGV Est high speed line set an official new world speed record.
2008: ATA Airlines, once one of the largest US passenger airlines and largest charter airline, filed for bankruptcy for the second time in five years and ceased all operations.
2010: Apple sold more than 300,000 of its latest product, the ipad tablet computer, on its launch day in the US.
2014: The UK government announced plans for cigarettes to be sold in plain, non-branded packaging.
2014:The US space agency (Nasa) suspended its ties with Russia in protest over the crisis in Ukraine, though it would continue to cooperate in the operation of the international space Station.