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Monday April 13, 2015

  • 103rd Day of 2015 262 Remaining
  • Summer Begins in 69 Days
  • Sunrise:6:36
  • Sunset:7:43
  • 13 Hours 7 Minutes
  • Moon Rise:3:11am
  • Moon Set:2:14pm
  • Phase:32%
  • Full Moon May 3 @ 8:44pm
  • Full Flower Moon In most areas, flowers are abundant everywhere during this time. Thus, the name of this Moon. Other names include the Full Corn Planting Moon, or the Milk Moon.
  • Tides
  • High:6:20am/8:06pm
  • Low:12:41am/1:05pm
  • Holidays
  • National Peach Cobbler Day
  • Scrabble Day
  •  
  • International Special Librarians Day
  • National Day-Chad
  • New Year-Cambodia
  • Songkran Days (Thai New Year)-Thailand
  • Pi Mai (Laos New Year)-Laos
  • Baisakhi/Vaisakhi-Sikhism
  • On This Day
  • 1742 --- Nowadays, the performance of George Friedrich Handel’s Messiah oratorio at Christmas time is a tradition almost as deeply entrenched as decorating trees and hanging stockings. In churches and concert halls around the world, the most famous piece of sacred music in the English language is performed both full and abridged, both with and without audience participation, but almost always and exclusively during the weeks leading up to the celebration of Christmas. It would surprise many, then, to learn that Messiah was not originally intended as a piece of Christmas music. Messiah received its world premiere on this day in 1742, during the Christian season of Lent, and in the decidedly secular context of a concert hall in Dublin, Ireland.
  • 1796 --- The first elephant to be brought to the U.S. arrived from Bengal, India. It was exhibited in New York, and its diet was described as: "thirty pounds of rice besides hay and straw.... all kinds of wine and spiritous liquors....and every kind of vegetable; it will also draw a cork from a bottle in its trunk."
  • 1829 --- The English Parliament granted freedom of religion to Catholics.
  • 1860 --- The first Pony Express mail delivery arrives in Sacramento, California (or possibly not until 1 a.m. on the 14th). The trip from St. Joseph, Missouri took 10 days.
  • 1861 --- At the start of the Civil War, Fort Sumter in South Carolina fell to Confederate forces as the Union commander, Maj. Robert Anderson, agreed to surrender in the face of relentless bombardment.
  • 1941 --- During World War II, representatives from the Soviet Union and Japan sign a five-year neutrality agreement. Although traditional enemies, the nonaggression pact allowed both nations to free up large numbers of troops occupying disputed territory in Manchuria and Outer Mongolia to be used for more pressing purposes.
  • 1954 --- Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron made his major league debut with the Milwaukee Braves.
  • 1958 --- Van Cliburn of Kilgore, TX, earned 1st prize in the Soviet Union's Tchaikovsky International Piano Contest in Moscow. He was the first American to win the award. 
  • 1963 --- Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds got his first hit in the major leagues. 
  • 1964 --- Sydney Poitier becomes the first African American to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, for his role as a construction worker who helps build a chapel in Lilies of the Field (1963).
  • 1966 --- The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) adopts a resolution urging that the United States “desist from aiding the military junta against the Buddhists, Catholics, and students, whose efforts to democratize their government are more in consonance with our traditions than the policy of the military oligarchy.” This resolution, which had little real impact on administration policies, indicated the growing dissatisfaction among many segments of the American population with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s handling of the war in Vietnam.
  • 1967 --- The Rolling Stones performed their first concert behind the Iron Curtain at the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, Poland.
  • 1970 --- Disaster strikes 200,000 miles from Earth when oxygen tank No. 2 blows up on Apollo 13, the third manned lunar landing mission. Astronauts James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert, and Fred W. Haise had left Earth two days before for the Fra Mauro highlands of the moon but were forced to turn their attention to simply making it home alive. Mission commander Lovell reported to mission control on Earth: “Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” and it was discovered that the normal supply of oxygen, electricity, light, and water had been disrupted. The landing mission was aborted, and the astronauts and controllers on Earth scrambled to come up with emergency procedures. The crippled spacecraft continued to the moon, circled it, and began a long, cold journey back to Earth.
  • 1972 --- The first strike in the history of major league baseball ended. Players had walked off the field 13 days earlier. 
  • 1981 --- Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke received a Pulitzer Prize for her feature about an 8-year-old heroin addict named "Jimmy." Cooke relinquished the prize two days later after admitting she had fabricated the story
  • 1990 --- The Soviet government officially accepts blame for the Katyn Massacre of World War II, when nearly 5,000 Polish military officers were murdered and buried in mass graves in the Katyn Forest. The admission was part of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s promise to be more forthcoming and candid concerning Soviet history.
  • 1997 --- Tiger Woods became the youngest person to win the Masters Tournament at the age of 21. He also set a record when he finished at 18 under par.
  • 1998 --- Dolly, the world's first cloned sheep, gave natural birth to a healthy baby lamb.
  • 1999 --- Jack Kervorkian was sentenced in Pontiac, MI, to 10 to 25 years in prison for the second-degree murder of Thomas Youk. Youk's assisted suicide was videotaped and shown on "60 Minutes" in 1998. 
  • 2011 --- A federal jury in San Francisco convicted Barry Bonds of obstruction of justice, but failed to reach a verdict on allegations that he'd used steroids and lied to a grand jury about it.
  • 2011 --- Ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his two sons were detained for investigation of corruption, abuse of power and killings of protesters.
  • Birthdays
  • Al Green
  • Jack Casady
  • Butch Cassidy
  • Thomas Jefferson
  • Baron Philippe de Rothschild
  • Edna Lewis
  • Samuel Beckett
  • Eudora Welty
  • Madalyn Murray O’Hair
  • Don Adams
  • Lowell George
  • Peabo Bryson
  • Saundra Santiago
  • Garry Kasparov