April 24

This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. 

Psalm 118:24

April is:

• National Art Glass Month - Sponsor: Art Glass Suppliers Association, Zanesville, Ohio.
  
  
• National Cable Month - To celebrate all that cable TV was supposed to be — and may yet become.
  
  
• National Fresh Celery Month

Today is:

• Ambivalence Day - Celebrate today by taking a stand, or not taking a stand, or staying in the middle. Sponsor: The Life of the Party.
  
  
• China Space Day - China launched its first satellite on this day in 1970.

Born on this Day

• 1576: St. Vincent de Paul
  

• 1620: John Graunt, statistician, founded the science of demography
  

• 1706: Padre Martini
  

• 1766: Publisher Robert Thomas Grafton, Massachusetts. He was founder and editor of "The Farmer's Almanac". The first issue came out in 1793.
  

• 1815: English novelist Anthony Trollope
  

• 1893: Actor Leslie Howard
  

• 1904: Artist Willem DeKooning
  

• 1905: U.S. poet laureate Robert Penn Warren
  

• 1916: Critic Stanley Kauffmann
  

• 1923: Actor J.D. Cannon
  

• 1934: Actress Shirley MacLaine
  

• 1940: Author Sue Grafton
  

• 1942: Actress-singer-director Barbra Streisand
  

• 1942: Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley
  

• 1943: Country singer Richard Sterban (The Oak Ridge Boys)
  

• 1945: Rock musician Doug Clifford (Creedence Clearwater Revival)
  

• 1947: Rock musician Glenn Cornick (Wild Turkey)
  

• 1953: Actor-playwright Eric Bogosian
  

• 1955: Actor Michael O'Keefe
  

• 1957: Rock musician David J (Bauhaus)
  

• 1963: Rock musician Billy Gould (Faith No More)
  

• 1964: Rock musician Paul Ryder (Happy Mondays)
  

• 1967: Rock musician Patty Schemel (Hole)
  

• 1968: Rock musician Aaron Comess (Spin Doctors)
  

• 1977: Actor Eric Balfour              
     

Events in History on this day
  

• 0455: Pope Leo decrees Easter to be this day for the year
  

• 0624: Death of St. Milletus
  

• 0709: Death of St. Wilfrid
  

• 0858: Election of Nicholas I, "the Great," as Pope
  

• 1066: Halley's Comet appeared over England. A monk spotted it and predicted the destruction of the country. The battle of Hastings followed and thousands of English were killed in it.
  

• 1505: Amerigo Vespucci, Italian mapmaker, becomes citizen of Spain
  

• 1519: Envoys of Montezuma II attend the first Easter Mass in Central America
  

• 1546: English Navy Board chartered by King Henry VIII
  

• 1558: Mary Queen of Scots, aged 16, married the Dauphin of France, the future Francis II.
  

• 1567: Bothwell takes Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, to his castle of Dunbar
  

• 1585: Election of Pope Sixtus V
  

• 1617: Assassination of Concino Concini, the Marechal d'Ancre
  

• 1629: Peace signed between England and France
  

• 1704: The Boston News Letter became the first American newspaper to be published on a regular basis.
  

• 1792: The national anthem of France, "La Marseillaise", was composed by Captain Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, an officer stationed in Strasbourg.
  

• 1800: Congress approved a bill establishing the Library of Congress in Washington DC, appropriating $5,000 "for the purchase of such books as may be necessary."
  

• 1833: Jacob Ebert of Cadiz, Ohio, and George Dulty of Wheeling, West Virginia, patented the soda fountain.
  

• 1866: Max Bruch's Violin Concerto in G minor, No. 1, Opus 26, was premiered.
  

• 1877: Federal troops moved out of New Orleans, ending the North's military occupation of the South following the Civil War.
  

• 1897: William W. Price began work at the Washington Star where he became the first regular White House reporter.
  

• 1898: Spain declared war on the United States after rejecting America's ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba.
  

• 1915: The Ottoman Turkish Empire began the brutal mass deportation of Armenians during World War One.
  

• 1916: Some 1600 Irish nationalists launched the Easter Rising by seizing several key sites in Dublin, including the General Post Office. (The rising was put down by British forces several days later.)
  

• 1925: Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto received its American premiere with the Boston Symphony. This is one of the greatest violin concertos ever written because it dramatically shows off the soloist without the use of any cadenzas.
  

• 1934: Laurens Hammond of Chicago, Illinois, announced the development of the pipeless organ.
  

• 1945: A new commissioner of baseball was named. He was Albert B. "Happy" Chandler.
  

• 1950: The state of Jordan was formed by the union of Jordanian-occupied Palestine and the Kingdom of Transjordan.
  

• 1952: Raymond Burr made his television acting debut on Gruen Guild Playhouse in an episode titled "The Tiger."
  

• 1953: British statesman Winston Churchill was knighted by Queen Elizabeth the Second at Buckingham Palace.
  

• 1961: Bob Dylan made his recording debut (and $50) playing harmonica on the title track of Harry Belafonte's "Midnight Special" album.
  

• 1962: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology achieved the first satellite relay of a television signal, between Camp Parks, California, and Westford, Massachusetts.
  

• 1968: Leftist students at Columbia University in New York began a week-long occupation of several campus buildings.
  

• 1970: The People's Republic of China launched its first satellite, which kept transmitting a song, "The East is Red."
  

• 1980: The United States launched an abortive attempt to free the American hostages in Iran, a mission that resulted in the deaths of eight US servicemen.
  

• 1983: Austria's governing Socialists lost their absolute majority in Parliament during national elections, prompting Chancellor Bruno Kreisky to announce he would resign after 13 years in office.
  

• 1984: The government reported consumer prices had risen .2 percent in March 1984, leaving inflation for the year running at a moderate annual rate of five percent.
  

• 1985: The 69th annual Pulitzer Prizes were announced, with the fiction award going to Alison Lurie's "Foreign Affairs," the drama award to Stephen Sondheim and James Lupine's "Sunday in the Park with George."
  

• 1986: Wallis, the Duchess of Windsor, for whom King Edward the Eighth gave up the British throne, died in Paris at age 89.
  

• 1987: Genetically altered bacteria, designed to prevent frost damage, was sprayed on a California strawberry field in the first test of such biotechnology in nature.
  

• 1987: 18 people, including 12 U.S. military personnel, were injured when a roadside bomb exploded in the Greek port of Piraeus; the guerrilla group November 17 claimed responsibility.
  

• 1988: Three sailors were killed and 22 injured when fire broke out aboard the submarine USS "Bonefish" off the Florida coast.
  

• 1988: Greek cycling champion Kanellos Kanellopoulos pedaled the human-powered aircraft Daedalus over the Agean Sea for nearly four hours.
  

• 1989: President Bush led a memorial service at the Norfolk Naval Station in Virginia for the 47 sailors killed in a gun-turret explosion aboard the USS Iowa.
  

• 1990: The space shuttle "Discovery" blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope is so powerful, it can see a dime, 25 miles away.
  

• 1990: Junk bond king, Michael Milken, pleaded guilty in what may have been one of the largest individual cases of fraud ever to rock Wall Street.
  

• 1990: East and West Germany agreed on July 2nd as the date for economic union, a prelude to full political unification.
  

• 1991: A Kurdish rebel leader announced the guerrillas had reached an agreement in principle with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to end the Kurd's two-week rebellion.
  

• 1992: President Bush and Democratic challenger Bill Clinton made long-distance appeals to Hispanic-Americans in back-to-back appearances via satellite hookups before the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
  

• 1993: The Irish Republican Army exploded a truck bomb in the City of London financial district, killing one man and causing millions of dollars' worth of damage.
  

• 1993: Former African National Congress president Oliver Tambo died in Johannesburg, South Africa, at age 75.
  

• 1992: President Bush and Democratic challenger Bill Clinton made long-distance back-to-back appearances via satellite hookups before the National Association of Hispanic Journalists meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
  

• 1994: Bosnian Serbs, threatened with NATO air strikes, grudgingly gave up their three-week assault on Gorazde, burning houses and blowing up a water treatment plant as they withdrew.
  

• 1995: A package bomb linked to the "Unabomber" exploded inside the Sacramento, California, offices of a lobbying group for the wood products industry, killing chief lobbyist Gilbert B. Murray.
  

• 1995: The U.N. tribunal for former Yugoslavia named Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and two of his senior aides as war crimes suspects.
  

• 1996: The main assembly of the Palestine Liberation Organization voted to revoke clauses in its charter that called for an armed struggle to destroy 
  

• 1996: Israel. Negotiators for Congress and the White House agreed on a permanent budget for fiscal year 1996.
  

• 1997: The prosecution and defense presented opening statements in the Oklahoma City bombing trial of Timothy McVeigh.
  

• 1997: The Senate voted 74-to-26 to approve the chemical weapons treaty, five days before the pact was to take effect.
  

• 1997: Comedian Pat Paulsen died in Mexico at age 69.
  

• 1998: After a month of confrontation, Russian lawmakers caved in to President Boris Yeltsin, approving acting prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko, 35, as premier despite doubts about his relative youth and inexperience. (Kiriyenko was fired just four months later.)
  

• 1999: President Clinton urged Americans to be patient with the bombing strategy.
  

• 1999: On the second day of a NATO summit, the alliance ran into objections from Russia and questions among its own members about enforcing an oil embargo against Yugoslavia by searching ships at sea.

•  2000: A teen-age gunman opened fire at Washington's National Zoo, wounding seven children. 
  

• 2000: Feigning concern about the disappearance of a laptop computer with highly sensitive documents, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reluctantly announced a five-point plan to help guard against such lapses in the future. 
  
  
  

Today's Daily Miscellany

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