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Zucchini Bread Day-KALW Almanac-4/25/2016

  • 116th Day of 2016 250 Remaining
  • Summer Begins in 56 Days
  • Sunrise: 6:19
  • Sunset: 7:55
  • 13 Hours 36 Minutes
  • Moon Rise: 11:12pm
  • Moon Set: 8:49am
  • Phase: 89% 18 Days
  • Next Full Moon May 21 @ 2:16pm
  • In most areas, flowers are abundant everywhere during this time. Thus, the name Full Flower Moon. Other names include the Full Corn Planting Moon, or the Milk Moon.
  • Tides
  • High: 12:50am/2:31pm
  • Low: 7:37am/7:30pm
  • Rainfall (July 1 – June 30)
  • This Year: 22.07
  • Last Year: 18.44
  • YTD Avg.: 22.77
  • Annual Avg.: 23.80
  • Holidays
  • National Zucchini Bread Day
  • National Crayola Day
  • East Meets West Day
  • Hairstylists Appreciation Day
  • National Mani-Pedi Day
  • National Plumber’s Day
  • National Telephone Day
  • Parental Alienation Awareness Day
  • Red Hat Society Day
  • DNA Day
  •  
  • World Penguin Day
  • World Malaria Day
  • Flag Day-Faroe Islands
  • Liberty Day-Portugal
  • Remembrance Day-Papua New Guinea
  • Flag Day-Swaziland
  • Sinai Liberation Day-Egypt
  • On This Day
  • 1719 --- Daniel Defoe’s fictional work The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is published. The book, about a shipwrecked sailor who spends 28 years on a deserted island, is based on the experiences of shipwreck victims and of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who spent four years on a small island off the coast of South America in the early 1700s.
  • 1792 --- Highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier became the first person under French law to be executed by guillotine.
  • 1859 --- At Port Said, Egypt, ground is broken for the Suez Canal, an artificial waterway intended to stretch 101 miles across the Isthmus of Suez and connect the Mediterranean and the Red seas. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat who organized the colossal undertaking, delivered the pickax blow that inaugurated construction. Artificial canals have been built on the Suez region, which connects the continents of Asia and Africa, since ancient times. Under the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, a channel connected the Bitter Lakes to the Red Sea, and a canal reached northward from Lake Timsah as far as the Nile River. These canals fell into disrepair or were intentionally destroyed for military reasons. As early as the 15th century, Europeans speculated about building a canal across the Suez, which would allow traders to sail from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean via the Red Sea, rather than having to sail the great distance around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.
  • 1945 --- Russian armies completely encircle Berlin, linking up with the U.S. First Army patrol, first on the western bank of the Elbe, then later at Torgau. Germany is, for all intents and purposes, Allied territory. The Allies sounded the death knell of their common enemy by celebrating. In Moscow, news of the link-up between the two armies resulted in a 324-gun salute; in New York, crowds burst into song and dance in the middle of Times Square. Among the Soviet commanders who participated in this historic meeting of the two armies was the renowned Russian Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, who warned a skeptical Stalin as early as June 1941 that Germany posed a serious threat to the Soviet Union. Zhukov would become invaluable in battling German forces within Russia (Stalingrad and Moscow) and without. It was also Zhukov who would demand and receive unconditional surrender of Berlin from German General Krebs less than a week after encircling the German capital. At the end of the war, Zhukov was awarded a military medal of honor from Great Britain.
  • 1947 --- President Harry S. Truman officially opens the first White House bowling alley. The two-lane bowling alley, situated in the West Wing, had been constructed earlier that year. Truman did not use the alley much himself, but supported a group of White House employees in forming a White House Bowling League in 1950. Teams included Secret Service agents, household staff, secretaries, switchboard operators and groundskeepers. The teams competed in tournaments across the country; many opponents were surprised to discover that the players were from the real White House.
  • 1959 --- St. Lawrence Seaway opened to shipping. The water way connects the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean.
  • 1980 --- In Iran, a commando mission to rescue hostages was aborted after mechanical problems disabled three of the eight helicopters involved. During the evacuation, a helicopter and a transport plane collided and exploded. Eight U.S. servicemen were killed. The mission was aimed at freeing American hostages that had been taken at the U.S. embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979. The event took place April 24th Washington, DC, time. 
  • 1989 --- James Richardson walks out of a Florida prison 21 years after being wrongfully convicted of killing his seven children. Special prosecutor Janet Reno agreed to the release after evidence showed that the conviction resulted from misconduct by the prosecutor. In addition, neighbor Betsy Reese had confessed to the crime to a nursing home employee. On October 25, 1967, James and his wife, Annie, were working in a field picking fruit when Reese came over to heat up a meal for the Richardson’s seven kids. After they finished eating, the children began foaming at the mouth. They were dead moments later from poisoning. Police found that the rice and beans had been laced with the pesticide parathion. Reese then reported that she saw a bag of the poison in a shed behind the Richardson’s home. Police discovered that an insurance salesman had visited the Richardson’s home shortly before the poisoning and that James had discussed life insurance for the entire family. The prosecution made a big deal of this fact at trial but neglected to inform the jury that the salesman had made an unsolicited visit and that Richardson never bought the insurance because he couldn’t afford the premiums. The prosecutors also introduced three convicts who claimed that Richardson had admitted to the mass murder while he was being held in jail. It was later revealed that this testimony was manufactured in return for leniency on their sentences. The jurors were not told about Reese’s criminal history. She was on parole at the time for killing her second husband and was suspected of killing her first husband with poison. After less than an hour and a half of deliberation, the jury convicted Richardson and sentenced him to the electric chair. After Richardson’s release in 1989, the governor of Florida ordered an investigation into the prosecutor’s office to discover what prompted the miscarriage of justice.
  • 1990 --- The crew of the U.S. space shuttle Discovery places the Hubble Space Telescope, a long-term space-based observatory, into a low orbit around Earth. The space telescope, conceived in the 1940s, designed in the 1970s, and built in the 1980s, was designed to give astronomers an unparalleled view of the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe. Initially, Hubble’s operators suffered a setback when a lens aberration was discovered, but a repair mission by space-walking astronauts in December 1993 successfully fixed the problem, and Hubble began sending back its first breathtaking images of the universe. Free of atmospheric distortions, Hubble has a resolution 10 times that of ground-based observatories. About the size of a bus, the telescope is solar-powered and orbits Earth once every 97 minutes. Among its many astronomical achievements, Hubble has been used to record a comet’s collision with Jupiter, provide a direct look at the surface of Pluto, view distant galaxies, gas clouds, and black holes, and see billions of years into the universe’s past.
  • 2003 --- Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader and ex-wife of former President Nelson Mandela, was sentenced to four years in prison for her conviction on fraud and theft charges. She was convicted of 43 counts of fraud and 25 of theft of money from a women's political league.
  • Birthdays
  • Ella Fitzgerald
  • Edward R Murrow
  • Meadowlark Lemon
  • Stu Cook
  • Guglielmo Marconi
  • Oliver Cromwell
  • Albert King
  • Vassar Clements
  • Al Pacino
  • Talia Shire
  • Hank Azaria
  • Renee’ Zelwigger
  • Sarah Paxton
  • Tim Duncan