Today is Friday, April 29, the 120th day of 2014. There are 246 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1429 – Joan of Arc enters Orleans, France, and defeats English.
1628 – Sweden and Denmark sign defense treaty against Duke of Wallenstein, bringing Sweden into the Thirty Years’ War.
1706 – Electors of Bavaria and Cologne are outlawed by Holy Roman Empire.
1781 – French fleet under Admiral Suffren prevents Britain from seizing Cape of Good Hope.
1826 – Liberal constitution is promulgated in Portugal for a hereditary monarchy.
1848 – Pope Pius IX dissociates himself from Italian national movement.
1861 – Maryland’s House of Delegates votes against seceding from the Union of the United States.
1862 – New Orleans falls to Union forces during the American Civil War.
1913 – Gideon Sundback of Hoboken, New Jersey, patents the zipper.
1916 – The Easter Rising in Dublin collapses as Irish nationalists surrender to British authorities.
1918 – Germany’s main offensive on Western Front in World War I ends.
1928 – British ultimatum forces Egypt to provide freedom of public meetings.
1931 – U.S. President Herbert Hoover receives the King of Siam. It was the first time an absolute monarch had traveled to the White House.
1945 – U.S. soldiers in Germany liberate 32,000 Nazi victims from a concentration camp in Dachau in World War II; in a Berlin bunker, Adolf Hitler marries Eva Braun and designates Admiral Karl Doenitz his successor. Hitler kills himself the next day.
1946 – Anglo-U.S. committee advises against partition of Palestine; 28 former Japanese leaders are indicted in Tokyo as war criminals.
1965 – Australia decides to send troops to South Vietnam.
1973 – Israel decides to expand civil rights of its 336,000 Arab citizens to reward Israeli Arab community for its loyalty.
1974 – U.S. President Richard Nixon announces he is releasing edited transcripts of secretly made White House tape recordings related to the Watergate scandal.
1975 – U.S. task force evacuates foreigners and Vietnamese by helicopter from Saigon.
1981 – Truck driver Peter Sutcliffe admits in a London court to being the “Yorkshire Ripper,” the killer of 13 women in northern England during a five-year period.
1989 – Police arrest about 2,200 workers and students in South Korea to try to block labor rally.
1990 – Wrecking cranes tear down the section of the Berlin Wall surrounding the Brandenburg Gate, the wall’s most famous section.
1992 – A jury in Los Angeles acquits policemen charged with a videotaped beating of black man Rodney King, setting off three days of riots that kill 55 people and causes $1 billion in damage.
1993 – Gunmen in Costa Rica free 18 Supreme Court justices they had held hostage for four days. Police capture the five gunmen after a brief gun battle.
1994 – South Africa’s first democratic elections end after an extra day of balloting intended to overcome delays and confusion.
1995 – In Sri Lanka, Tamil separatist rebels down a military jet with a missile, killing 52 people and escalating their 12-year war for a homeland.
1996 – Heavy fighting between rival factions sends civilians fleeing for shelter again as a 10-day-old truce collapses in Monrovia, Liberia.
1997 – Astronaut Jerry Linenger and cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev go on the first U.S.-Russian space walk.
1998 – Brazil announces an unprecedented plan to protect an area of Amazon forest half the size of France.
2000 – Police in Azerbaijan beat back more than 1,000 demonstrators seeking to stage an unsanctioned opposition rally in the capital Baku.
2003 – Pakistani police in Karachi arrest six suspected members of the al-Qaida terrorist network who allegedly were planning attacks on U.S. targets in Pakistan.
2005 – U.N. peacekeepers sexually abused and exploited local women and girls in Liberia, a U.N. spokesman reports. Allegations that were found to be substantiated in Liberia are the latest to be leveled against U.N. peacekeepers who had been accused of sexually abusing the very people they were sent to protect in missions from Bosnia and Kosovo to Cambodia, East Timor and Congo.
2006 – Bolivian President Evo Morales joins Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in Havana for an endorsement of a socialist trade initiative aimed at providing an alternative to U.S.-backed free trade efforts in Latin America.
2007 – Gunmen seriously wound one of Iraq’s best known radio and television journalists, Amal al-Moudares, near her home in the capital. On April 5, Baghdad police found the bullet-ridden body of Khamael Muhsin, another famous radio and TV presenter.
2008 – The United States and France introduce a U.N. resolution that would allow countries to chase pirates off Somalia’s coast into the country’s territorial waters and arrest the sea thieves.
2009 – The Geneva-based World Health Organization raises its alert level for the fast-spreading swine flu to its next-to-highest notch, signaling a global pandemic could be imminent.
2010 – A 47-year-old knife-wielding man slashes 28 children, two teachers and a security guard in the second such school attack in China in two days. No motive was given.
2011 — Prince William and Kate Middleton smile and blush as they start their life as future king and queen of Britain. A day of seamless pageantry inspires hopes that this royal couple might live happily ever after.
2012 — The surprising escape of a blind legal activist from house arrest to the presumed custody of U.S. diplomats is buoying China’s embattled dissident community even as the government lashes out, detaining those who helped him and squelching mention of his name on the Internet.
2013 — Syria’s prime minister narrowly escapes an assassination attempt in the heart of the heavily defended capital, laying bare the vulnerability of President Bashar Assad’s regime.
2014— The Italian appeals court that reinstated the conviction against Amanda Knox in her British roommate’s 2007 murder said in a lengthy reasoning made public Tuesday that Knox herself delivered the fatal blow out of a desire to “overpower and humiliate” the victim.
Today’s Birthdays:
John Arbuthnot, English physicist-satirist (1667-1745); Alexander II, czar of Russia (1818-81); Japan’s Emperor Hirohito (1901-1989); Sir Malcolm Sargent, English conductor (1895-1967); Zubin Mehta, Indian conductor (1936–); Jerry Seinfeld, U.S. comedian (1954–); Michelle Pfeiffer, U.S. actress (1958–); Daniel Day-Lewis, English-born actor (1957–); Uma Thurman, U.S. actress (1970–).
Thought For Today:
If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing — Anatole France, French author and critic (1844-1924).
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
