- 97th Day of 2015 268 Remaining
- Summer Begins in 75 Days
- Sunrise:6:44
- Sunset:7:38
- 12 Hours 54 Minutes
- Moon Rise:10:54pm
- Moon Set:8:45am
- Phase:90%
- 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:12:52am/2:03pm
- Low:7:26am/7:18pm
- Rainfall:
- This Year to Date:17.27
- Last Year:12.30
- Avg YTD:21.88
- Annual Avg:23.80
- Holidays
- Egg Salad Week
- Metric System Day
- National Beer Day
- National Coffee Cake Day
- National No Housework Day
- World Health Day
- International Beaver Day
- International Snailpapers Day
- Day Of Beauty And Mother’s-Armenia
- Genocide Remembrance Day-Rwanda
- Toussaint L’Ouverture Day-Haiti
- Women’s Day-Mozambique
- On This Day
- 1712 --- A slave revolt broke out in New York City.
- 1776 --- Navy Captain John Barry, commander of the American warship Lexington, makes the first American naval capture of a British vessel when he takes command of the British warship HMS Edward off the coast of Virginia. The capture of theEdward and its cargo turned Captain Barry into a national hero and boosted the morale of the Continental forces.
- 1857 --- A cold front barrels over the U.S. and snow falls in every state in the country.
- 1888 --- P.F. Collier published a weekly periodical for the first time under the name "Collier’s."
- 1927 --- The first long-distance TV transmission was sent from Washington, DC, to New York City. The audience saw an image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover.
- 1940 --- Booker T. Washington became the first black to be pictured on a U.S. postage stamp.
- 1945 --- The Japanese battleship Yamato, ostensibly the greatest battleship in the world, is sunk in Japan’s first major counteroffensive in the struggle for Okinawa. Weighing 72,800 tons and outfitted with nine 18.1-inch guns, the battleship Yamato was Japan’s only hope of destroying the Allied fleet off the coast of Okinawa. But insufficient air cover and fuel cursed the endeavor as a suicide mission.
- 1949 --- The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "South Pacific" opened on Broadway.
- 1953 --- IBM unveiled the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine. It was IBM's first commercially available scientific computer.
- 1953 --- By a vote of 57 to 1, Dag Hammarskjold is elected secretary-general of the United Nations.The son of Hjalmar Hammarskjold, a former prime minister of Sweden, Dag joined Sweden’s foreign ministry in 1947, and in 1951 formally entered the cabinet as deputy foreign minister.
- 1954 --- President Dwight D. Eisenhower coins one of the most famous Cold War phrases when he suggests the fall of French Indochina to the communists could create a “domino” effect in Southeast Asia. The so-called “domino theory” dominated U.S. thinking about Vietnam for the next decade.
- 1957 --- The last of New York City's electric trolleys completed its final run from Queens to Manhattan.
- 1961 --- President John F. Kennedy sends a letter to Congress in which he recommends the U.S. participate in an international campaign to preserve ancient temples and historic monuments in the Nile Valley of Egypt. The campaign, initiated by UNESCO, was designed to save sites threatened by the construction of the Aswan High Dam.
- 1963 --- Yugoslavia proclaimed itself a Socialist republic. Josip Broz Tito was proclaimed to be the leader of Yugoslavia for life.
- 1969 --- The Supreme Court unanimously struck down laws prohibiting private possession of obscene material.
- 1970 --- John Wayne won his first and only Oscar for his role in "True Grit". He had been in over 200 films.
- 1975 --- North Vietnamese forces prepare to launch the “Ho Chi Minh Campaign,” designed to set the conditions for a final communist victory in South Vietnam. By this time, well over two-thirds of South Vietnam was under communist control as South Vietnamese forces had fallen back in panic when the North Vietnamese pressed the attack.
- 1975 --- Beverly Sills made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in Gioacchino Rossini's "Siege of Corinth."
- 1983 --- Specialist Story Musgrave and Don Peterson made the first Space Shuttle spacewalk.
- 1988 --- Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to final terms of a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Soviet troops began leaving on May 16, 1988.
- 1989 --- A Soviet submarine carrying nuclear weapons sank in the Norwegian Sea.
- 1990 --- In a tragic coincidence, two separate ferry accidents in different areas of the world take the lives of a reported 325 people. The first took place in Myanmar (formerly Burma) on the Gyaing River. Later in the day, Scandinavia was also rocked by tragedy. A double-decker ferry traveling from Moulmein to Kyondo along the Gyaing River in Myanmar was carrying approximately 240 passengers and crew through a violent storm with very strong winds. The intensity of the wind gusts was compounded by the ferry operators failure to properly distribute the weight of the passengers in the boat, a deadly error. The combination caused the ferry to tip over and eventually to turn over completely in the water. Many of the people on board were trapped underwater. An estimated 215 of the ferry s 240 passengers perished. On the night of that same day, the Scandinavian Star, a Danish-owned vessel, was making its first trip after being bought by VR-DANO from SeaEscape, Ltd. It was carrying 493 passengers and their cars and trucks from Oslo, Norway, to Frederikshaven, Denmark. The vessel was in the Skagerrak Strait, which stretches between Norway and Denmark, when fire broke out on board. While the crew put out the fire, a second undetected fire was raging out of control. Smoke detectors failed and no fire alarm was set off. The crew, most speaking only Portuguese, were not prepared for the emergency and were unable to communicate escape plans to the passengers. While some made it to lifeboats, panic ensued, and 110 died, mainly from smoke inhalation.
- 1990 --- Former national security adviser John M. Poindexter was convicted of five counts at his Iran-Contra trial. (A federal appeals court later reversed the convictions.)
- 1990 --- A display of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs opened at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center; the center and its director were indicted on obscenity charges.
- 1994 --- Rwandan armed forces kill 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers in a successful effort to discourage international intervention in the genocide that had begun only hours earlier. In approximately three months, the Hutu extremists who controlled Rwanda brutally murdered an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the worst episode of ethnic genocide since World War II.
- 1998 --- George Michael was arrested in a public restroom in Beverly Hills for lewd conduct. He was sentenced to community service for the incident.
- 2000 --- President Clinton signed the Senior Citizens Freedom to Work Act of 2000. The bill reversed a Depression-era law and allows senior citizens to earn money without losing Social Security retirement benefits.
- 2001 --- NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft took off on a six-month, 286-million-mile journey to the red planet.
- 2003 --- U.S. troops in more than 100 U.S. armored vehicles rumbled through downtown Baghdad and seized one of Saddam Hussein's opulent palaces.
- 2009 --- Vermont became the fourth state to legalize gay marriage.
- 2009 --- Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering killings and kidnappings by security forces.
- Birthdays
- Billie Holliday
- William Woodsworth
- John McGraw
- Will Kellogg
- Walter Winchell
- Jersey Joe Walcott
- Irene Castle
- Percy Faith
- Ravi Shankar
- Daniel Ellsberg
- Freddy Hubbard
- Spencer Dryden
- Francis Ford Coppola
- Janis Ian
- John Oates
- Jackie Chan
- Russell Crowe
Tuesday April 7, 2015
