TODAY IN HISTORY
Today’s highlight:
On April 13, 1970, Apollo 13, four-fifths of the way to the moon, was crippled when a tank containing liquid oxygen burst.
On this date:
In 1743, the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, was born in Shadwell in the Virginia Colony.
In 1861, at the start of the Civil War, Fort Sumter in South Carolina fell to Confederate forces.
In 1943, President Frank- lin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in Wash- ington, D.C., on the 200th anniversary of the third pres- ident’s birth.
In 1953, “Casino Royale,” Ian Fleming’s first book as well as the first James Bond novel, was published in London by Jonathan Cape Ltd.
In 1964, Sidney Poitier became the first Black per- former in a leading role to win an Academy Award for his performance in “Lilies of the Field.”
In 1997, Tiger Woods became the youngest per- son to win the Masters Tour- nament and the first player of partly African heritage to claim a major golf title.
In 1999, right-to-die advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian was sentenced in Pontiac, Michigan, to 10 to 25 years in prison for second-degree murder in the lethal injection of a Lou Gehrig’s disease patient. (Kevorkian ended up serving eight years.)
In 2005, a defiant Eric Rudolph pleaded guilty to carrying out the deadly bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and three other attacks in back-to-back court appearances in Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta.
In 2009, music producer Phil Spector was found guilty by a Los Angeles jury of second-degree murder in the shooting of actor Lana Clarkson.
In 2011, A federal jury in San Francisco convicted baseball slugger Barry Bonds of a single charge of obstruction of justice, but failed to reach a verdict on the three counts at the heart of allegations that he’d knowingly used steroids and lied to a grand jury about it. (Bonds’ conviction for obstruction was ultimately overturned.)