TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Sunday, April 8, the 98th day of 2018. There are 267 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History
On April 8, 1974, Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hit his 715th career home run in a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, breaking Babe Ruth’s record.
On this date
1820 — The Venus de Milo statue was discovered by a farmer on the Greek island of Milos.
1864 — The United States Senate passed, 38-6, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing slavery. (The House of Representatives passed it in January 1865; the amendment was ratified and adopted in December 1865.)
1913 — The 17th Amendment to the Constitution, providing for popular election of U.S. senators (as opposed to appointment by state legislatures), was ratified.
1923 — Henry Ford visited Berry School. Romans were disappointed when he parked his personal car in Kingston.
1935 — President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, which provided money for programs such as the Works Progress Administration.
1952 — President Harry S. Truman seized the American steel industry to avert a nationwide strike. (The Supreme Court later ruled that Truman had overstepped his authority, opening the way for a seven-week strike by steelworkers.)
1961 — A suspected bomb exploded aboard the passenger liner MV Dara in the Persian Gulf, causing it to sink; 238 of the 819 people aboard were killed.
1973 — Artist Pablo Picasso died in Mougins, France, at age 91.
1988 — TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart resigned from the Assemblies of God after he was defrocked for rejecting an order from the church’s national leaders to stop preaching for a year amid reports he had consorted with a prostitute.
1994 — Kurt Cobain, singer and guitarist for the grunge band Nirvana, was found dead in Seattle from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound; he was 27.
2003 — Kidnapper-rapist John Jamelske, who had imprisoned five women and girls, one after another, as sex slaves inside a makeshift dungeon in his DeWitt, New York, home, was arrested. (Jamelske, who pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree kidnapping, is serving an 18 years-to-life sentence in a maximum security prison.)
Ten years ago
The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Gen. David Petraeus, told Congress that hard-won gains in the war zone were too fragile to promise any troop pullouts beyond the summer as he held his ground against impatient Democrats and refused to commit to more withdrawals before President George W. Bush left office in January 2009.
American Airlines grounded all 300 of its MD80 jetliners amid safety concerns about wiring bundles; the carrier ended up canceling more than 3,000 flights over the next four days.
Thought for today ‘The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything.’ Susan Sontag American author and critic (1933-2004)