Today in History
Today’s highlight:
On April 17, 1961, some 1,500 Cia-trained Cuban exiles launched the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in an attempt to topple Fidel Castro, whose forces crushed the incursion by the third day.
On this date:
1492: A contract was signed by Christopher Columbus and a representative of Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, giving Columbus a commission to seek a westward ocean passage to Asia.
1521: Martin Luther went before the Diet of Worms to face charges stemming from his religious writings.
1524: Giovanni da
Verrazano reached present-day New York Harbor.
1969: A jury in Los Angeles convicted Sirhan
Sirhan of assassinating
Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
1970: Apollo 13 astronauts James A. Lovell, Fred W. Haise
and Jack Swigert splashed down safely in the Pacific, four days after a ruptured oxygen tank crippled their spacecraft while en route to the moon.
1972: The Boston Marathon allowed women to compete for the first time; Nina Kuscsik was the first officially recognized women’s champion, with a time of 3:10:26.
1973: Federal Express, later Fedex, began operations as 14 planes carrying 186 packages took off from Memphis International Airport, bound for 25 U.S. cities.
1975: Cambodia’s five-year war ended as the capital Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, which instituted brutal, radical policies that claimed an estimated 1.7 million lives until the regime was overthrown in 1979.
1986: At London’s Heathrow Airport, a bomb was discovered in the bag of Anne-marie Murphy, a pregnant Irishwoman about to board an El Al jetliner to Israel; she’d been tricked into carrying the bomb by her Jordanian fiance, Nezar Hindawi. The bodies of kidnapped American Peter Kilburn and Britons Philip
Padfield and Leigh Douglas were found near Beirut; they had been slain in apparent retaliation for the U.S. raid on Libya.
1993: A federal jury in Los Angeles convicted two former police officers of violating the civil rights of beaten motorist
Rodney King; two other officers were acquitted.
2007: A day after the Virginia Tech massacre, President
George W. Bush visited the campus, where he told students and teachers at a somber convocation that the nation was praying for them and “there’s a power in these prayers.”
Ten years ago: Some 100,000 Poles filled Warsaw’s biggest public square, joining together for a memorial and funeral Mass for the 96 people killed in a plane crash a week earlier.
Five years ago: President Barack Obama left open the door to “creative negotiations” in response to Iran’s demand that punishing sanctions be immediately lifted as part of a nuclear deal. The president spoke at a White House news conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renz.
One year ago: Just days after Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was ravaged by a fire, police in New York said they had arrested a college philosophy teacher who they said had entered St. Patrick’s Cathedral carrying two cans of gasoline, lighter fluid and butane lighters; they said he had also booked a flight to Rome the following day.