TODAY IN HISTORY: Chernobyl plant explodes
In 322, St. Basil was martyred by torture and beheading after he sheltered a young Christian woman named Glaphiga from the clutches of Roman Emperor Lucinius.
In 387, St. Augustine, author of "City of God," was baptized. He recorded his entrance into the church: “And we were baptized and all anxiety for our past life vanished away.”
In 1625, the first Roman Catholic Jesuits arrived in Canada at Quebec.
In 1778, British Captain James Cook sailed from Nootka Sound, tracing the coast of British Columbia and Alaska.
In 1860, the Second Batallion Volunteer Militia Rifles of Canada was formed from six independent militia units. It later became the Queen's Own Rifles of Canada, the oldest regiment in the Canadian regular army.
In 1865, John Wilkes Booth, assassin of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, was surrounded by federal troops near Bowling Green, Va., and killed.
In 1918, women in Nova Scotia were granted the right to vote.
In 1923, Prince Albert, Duke of York, married Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. He later became King George VI, while she became Queen Elizabeth and — after her husband's death in 1952 — the Queen Mother.
In 1942, more than 1,500 people died in the world’s worst mining disaster in Japanese-occupied China.
In 1956, the first Godzilla movie, Godzilla, King of the Monsters, premiered in New York.
In 1964, the African nations of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania.
In 1968, beneath the Nevada desert, the U.S. exploded a one-megaton nuclear device called “The Boxcar.”
In 1977, the disco haven, Studio 54, opened in New York. It became the centre of the jet-set disco society in the late 1970s, attracting the likes of Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger.
In 1986, the worst nuclear accident in history occurred at the Chernobyl plant in the Soviet Union. An experiment went awry, causing an explosion and fire that sent radioactivity into the atmosphere; 40,000 people were forced from the area and at least 31 died. The outside world did not learn of the accident until Scandinavian technicians detected abnormally high radiation levels two days later.
In 1989, pioneering television comedian Lucille Ball died of a heart attack at age 77.
In 1992, worshippers in Moscow openly celebrated the Russian Orthodox Easter for the first time in 74 years.
In 2004, the Newfoundland and Labrador government introduced tough back-to-work legislation to end a 27-day strike by about 20,000 government, health-care and school-board workers.
In 2005, Syria pulled its troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon — ending a 29-year military presence in Lebanon.
In 2008, police in Austria arrested Josef Fritzl, freeing his daughter Elisabeth and her six children, whom he had fathered while holding her captive in a cellar for 24 years. Fritzl was later sentenced to life in a psychiatric ward.
In 2009, the Canadian Auto Workers union approved a historic deal with Chrysler that would save the automaker $240 million a year and paved the way for Chrysler's technologysharing alliance with Fiat.
In 2012, an international court convicted former Liberian President Charles Taylor of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity for supporting notoriously brutal Sierra Leone rebels in return for blood diamonds. Taylor was the first head of state convicted by an international court since the Nuremberg trials.
In 2018, Bill Cosby was convicted of drugging and molesting Toronto native and Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. The conviction was overturned in 2021.