- 83rd Day of 2014 / 282 Remaining
- 89 Days Until The First Day of Summer
- Sunrise:7:05
- Sunset:7:25
- 12 Hours 20 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:2:36am
- Moon Set:1:02pm
- Moon’s Phase: 42 %
- The Next Full Moon
- April 15 @ 12:45 am
- Full Pink Moon
- Full Sprouting Moon
- Full Egg Moon
- Full Grass Moon
- Full Fish Moon
This name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.
- Tides
- High:5:08am/7:26pm
- Low:12:13pm
- Rainfall
- This Year:8.68
- Last Year:14.73
- Average Year to Date:20.85
- Holidays
- Houdini Day
- National Chocolate Covered Raisins Day
- St. Gabriel Feast Day
- World Tuberculosis Day
- Independence Day (Philippines)
- Covenant Day-Northern Marianas
- Tree Planting Day-Uganda
- On This Day In …
- 1765 --- The British Parliament passed the Quartering Act, which required American colonists to provide temporary quarters, food, drink, etc. to British troops stationed in their towns.
- 1837 --- Canada gave blacks the right to vote
- 1882 --- German scientist Robert Koch announced in Berlin that he had discovered the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis.
- 1883 --- Long-distance telephone service was inaugurated between Chicago and New York City.
- 1900 --- Mayor Van Wyck of New York broke the ground for the New York subway tunnel that would link Manhattan and Brooklyn.
- 1913 --- The home of vaudeville, the Palace Theatre, opened in New York City.
- 1932 --- Belle Baker hosted a radio variety show from a moving train ... a first for radio broadcasting. The program originated from a Baltimore and Ohio train that chugged its way around the New York area. The broadcast was heard on WABC in New York City.
- 1935 --- After a year as a local show from New York City, Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour was heard on the entire NBC radio network. The show stayed on the air for 17 years. Later, Ted Mack took over for Bowes and made the move from radio to television.
- 1949 --- President Harry S. Truman signs a U.S. resolution authorizing $16 million in aid for Palestinian refugees displaced and facing starvation as a result of Israel's War of Independence in 1948. Truman's resolution contributed U.S. funds to a $32 million United Nations (U.N) aid package. At the signing, the president stated his hope that before the relief money ran out, [the] means will be devised for the permanent solution of the refugee problem. Truman argued that U.S. aid would contribute to the long-term stability of the Middle East through [integrating] Palestinian refugees into the economic life of the [underdeveloped] area.
- 1955 --- The Tennessee Williams play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, opened on Broadway. The hit ran for 694 shows and won the Critics’ Circle Award as the Best American Play.
- 1958 --- Elvis Presley reported to local draft board 86 in Memphis, TN. He became US 53310761. Oddly, since Elvis was now ‘government property’ serving his time in the Army, Uncle Sam stood to lose an estimated $500,000 in lost taxes each year that Private Presley was in the Army.
- 1965 --- The first "teach-in" is conducted at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; two hundred faculty members participate by holding special anti-war seminars. Regular classes were canceled,and rallies and speeches dominated for 12 hours. On March 26, there was a similar teach-in at Columbia University in New York City; this form of protest eventually spread to many colleges and universities.
- 1977 --- For the first time since severing diplomatic relations in 1961, Cuba and the United States enter into direct negotiations when the two nations discuss fishing rights. The talks marked a dramatic, but short-lived, change in relations between the two Cold War enemies.
- 1988 --- Former national security aides Oliver L. North and John M. Poindexter and businessmen Richard V. Secord and Albert Hakim pled innocent to Iran-Contra charges.
1989 --- The worst oil spill in U.S. territory begins when the supertanker Exxon Valdez, owned and operated by the Exxon Corporation, runs aground on a reef in Prince William Sound in
southern Alaska. An estimated 11 million gallons of oil eventually spilled into the water. Attempts to contain the massive spill were unsuccessful, and wind and currents spread the oil more than 100 miles from its source, eventually polluting more than 700 miles of coastline. Hundreds of thousands of birds and animals were
adversely affected by the environmental disaster. It was later revealed that Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of the Valdez, was drinking at the time of the accident and allowed an uncertified officer to steer the massive vessel. In March 1990, Hazelwood was convicted of misdemeanor negligence, fined $50,000, and ordered to perform 1,000 hours of community service. In July 1992, an Alaska court overturned Hazelwood's conviction, citing a federal statute that grants freedom from prosecution to those who report an oil spill. Exxon itself was condemned by the National Transportation Safety Board and in early 1991 agreed under pressure from environmental groups to pay a penalty of $100 million and provide $1 billion over a
10-year period for the cost of the cleanup. However, later in the year, both Alaska and Exxon rejected the agreement, and in October 1991 the oil giant settled the matter by paying $25 million, less than 4 percent of the cleanup aid promised by Exxon earlier that year.
- 1996 --- U.S. astronaut Shannon Lucid transfers to the Russian space station Mir from the U.S. space shuttle Atlantis for a planned five-month stay. Lucid was the first female U.S. astronaut to live in a space station. Lucid, a biochemist, shared Mir with Russian cosmonauts Yuri Onufriyenko and Yuri Usachev, conductingscientific experiments during her stay. Beginning in August, her scheduled return to Earth was delayed more than six weeks because of last-minute repairs to the booster rockets of Atlantis and then by a hurricane. Finally, on September 26, 1996, she returned to Earth aboard Atlantis, touching down at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Her 188-day sojourn aboard Mir set a new space endurance record for an American and a world endurance record for a woman.
- 1997 --- The Australian parliament overturned the world's first and only euthanasia law.
- 1998 --- A former FBI agent said papers found in James Earl Ray's car supports a conspiracy theory in the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
- 1999 --- The 7-mile tunnel under Mont Blanc in France was an inferno after a truck carrying flour and margarine caught on fire. At least 30 people were killed.
- 2002 --- Thieves stole five 17th century paintings from the Frans Hals Museum in the Dutch city of Haarlem. The paintings were worth about $2.6 million. The paintings were works by Jan Steen, Cornelis Bega, Adriaan van Ostade and Cornelis Dusart.
- 2002 --- Halle Berry became the first African-American performer to win a best actress Oscar, for "Monster's Ball." Berry was only the second African-American actress ever to be honored by the Academy (the first was Hattie McDaniel, who won for her supporting role in 1939’s “Gone With the Wind”). As an emotional Berryclutched her Oscar, she tearfully called the moment “so much bigger than me” and declared that “the door had been opened” for actresses of color. On the heels of Berry’s historic win, Denzel Washington became only the second African-American man to win in the Best Actor category, accepting the statuette for his role as a corrupt Los Angeles police officer in “Training Day”.
- Birthdays
- Lawrence Ferlenghetti
- Jim Parsons
- Bob Mackie
- Star Jones
- Lee Oskar
- Lara Flynn Boyle
- Nick Lowe
- Dorothy Stratton
- Peyton Manning
- Louie Anderson
- Robert Carradine
- Kelly LeBrock
- Harry Houdini
- Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle
- Clyde Barrow
- Rufus King
- Andrew Mellon
- Arthur Murray
- Steve McQueen