This Day in History – April 1
Today is the 91st day of 2021. There are 274 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2001: Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic surrenders after a 26-hour stand-off against police looking to arrest him for charges linked to a decade of repressive rule.
OTHER EVENTS
1572: Start of Dutch War for Independence from Spain.
1666: French forces capture St Kitts, Leeward Islands, West Indies, from England.
1853: Cincinnati, Ohio, becomes the first US city to pay its firefighters a regular salary.
1863: The first wartime US conscription law is enacted.
1867: British East India Company rule in Malay Straits Settlements (now in Malaysia and Singapore) ends, and they become a Crown Colony of Britain.
1918: Britain’s Royal Air Force is founded.
1933: Nazi Germany begins persecuting Jews with a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses.
1937: India’s Constitution goes into effect but All-India Party abstains from forming government, demanding complete independence.
1939: Spanish Civil War ends with Nationalist victory, one million dead and a dictatorship as the United States recognises the Franco Government in Spain.
1948: Soviet Union begins to interfere with traffic between Berlin and West Germany.
1955: The Tourist Trade Development Board officially becomes the Jamaica Tourist Board.
1960: South African Government bans African National Congress and Pan-African Congress; the first weather satellite, TIROS-1, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
1964: A military coup in Brazil overthrows the leftist Government of President Joao Goulart.
1970: US President Richard M Nixon signs a measure banning cigarette advertising on radio and television.
1986: In his first major speech on the epidemic, US President Ronald Reagan tells doctors in Philadelphia, “We’ve declared AIDS public health enemy No 1.”
1992: US President George H W Bush pledges United States will help finance the US$24-billion international aid fund for the former Soviet Union.
1996: Britain proposes slaughtering 15,000 of its cattle every week for the next six years to fight mad cow disease and convince its European Union partners to quickly lift a ban on British beef exports.
1998: Israel formally accepts a United Nations resolution calling for its withdrawal from south Lebanon, a policy change that represents a first step toward ending a 20-year occupation.
2006: Kurdish protesters attack government offices and a bank while police fire shots and tear gas to scatter thousands of demonstrators in Turkey’s Kurdish-dominated south-east.
2007: Nepal’s communist rebels join an interim government as part of a landmark peace deal that ended their decade-long insurgency.
2008: Gunmen fire on a car carrying foreign aid workers and abduct a Briton and a Kenyan in southern Somalia.
2010: Cardinals across Europe use their Holy Week sermons to defend Pope Benedict XVI from accusations that he played a role in covering up sex abuse scandals.
2011: Afghans angry over the burning of a Quran at a small Florida church storm a UN compound in northern Afghanistan, killing seven foreigners, including four Nepalese guards.
2013: India’s Supreme Court rejects drugmaker Novartis AG’s right to patent a new version of a lifesaving cancer drug in a landmark decision that health care activists says ensures the world’s poor get access to cheap, generic medicines.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS:
Edmond Rostand, French writer (1868-1919); Sergei Rachmaninoff, Russian composer (1873-1943); Yilmaz Guney, Turkish film director (1937-1984); Debbie Reynolds, US actress (1932-2016); Ali MacGraw, US actress (1939- ); James Chambers, ska and reggae musician known by stage name Jimmy Cliff (1948- )
– AP/Jamaica Observer
About The Author
