HISTORY FOR TODAY

  2012 The trial of Anders Behring Breivik begins in Oslo The right-wing extremist had killed 77 people, mostly teenagers, in Oslo with a car bomb and at a youth camp on Utøya island. After doubts about his mental health emerged before the trial, he was sentenced to 21 years in prison. 2003 Ten new member states are admitted to the European Union The Treaty of Accession admitted countries including Poland, Cyprus, and the Czech Republic to the EU. Its original title contains 99 words. 1964 The Rolling Stones release their debut album The album The Rolling Stones, released in the United States with the added title “England's Newest Hit Makers”, topped the UK charts for twelve weeks. 1917 Vladimir Lenin returns to Russia from exile The communist revolutionary became leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (SFSR) later that year. From 1922, he was the first Premier of the Soviet Union. 1912 Harriet Quimby flies across the English Channel The U.S. aviator was the fir...

  1994 The World Trade Organization is founded The WTO coordinates and strives to liberalize international trade. It has been criticized for ignoring and escalating the negative social and environmental side-effects of globalization. 1989 A small group of students initiates pro-democracy protest on Tiananmen Square in Beijing The death of reformer Hu Yaobang triggered the demonstrations, which grew in size and were brutally dispersed in the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4. 1986 The United States launches retaliatory air strikes against Libya Around 40 Libyans died in Operation El Dorado Canyon, including an infant girl. The attack was the United States' response to the bombing of a Berlin discotheque on April 5, in which 3 people had died. 1945 The German concentration camp Bergen-Belsen is liberated British and Canadian troops found about 53,000 prisoners inside the camp. Tens of thousands died before and after the liberation. 1935 The Eastman Kodak Company launches Kodachrome...

  Pope John Paul II dies On April 2, 2005, John Paul II, history’s most well-traveled pope and the first non-Italian to hold the position since the 16th century, dies at his home in the Vatican. Six days later, two million people packed Vatican City for his funeral, said to be one of the biggest in history. John Paul II was born Karol Jozef Wojtyla in Wadowice, Poland, 35 miles southwest of Krakow, in 1920. After high school, the future pope enrolled at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, where he studied philosophy and literature and performed in a theater group. During World War II, Nazis occupied Krakow and closed the university, forcing Wojtyla to seek work in a quarry and, later, a chemical factory. By 1941, his mother, father, and only brother had all died, leaving him the sole surviving member of his family. Although Wojtyla had been involved in the church his whole life, it was not until 1942 that he began seminary training. When the war ended, he returned to school at Jagiel...

  April Fools’ tradition popularized On April 1, 1700, English pranksters begin popularizing the annual tradition of April Fools’ Day by playing practical jokes on each other. Although the day, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, its exact origins remain a mystery. Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes. These pranks included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as poisson d’avril (April fish), said to symbolize a young, “easily hooked” fish and a gullible person. April Fools’ Day spread throughout Britain during the 18th century. In...

  President Reagan shot On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest outside a Washington, D.C. hotel by a drifter named John Hinckley Jr. The president had just finished addressing a labor meeting at the Washington Hilton Hotel and was walking with his entourage to his limousine when Hinckley, standing among a group of reporters, fired six shots at the president, hitting Reagan and three of his attendants. White House Press Secretary James Brady was shot in the head and critically wounded, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy was shot in the side, and District of Columbia policeman Thomas Delahanty was shot in the neck. After firing the shots, Hinckley was overpowered and pinned against a wall, and President Reagan, apparently unaware that he’d been shot, was shoved into his limousine by a Secret Service agent and rushed to the hospital. The president was shot in the left lung, and the .22 caliber bullet just missed his heart. In an impressive feat for a 70-yea...

  U.S. withdraws from Vietnam March 29, 1973: Two months after the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement, the last U.S. combat troops leave South Vietnam as Hanoi frees many of the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. America’s direct eight-year intervention in the Vietnam War was at an end. In Saigon, some 7,000 U.S. Department of Defense civilian employees remained behind to aid South Vietnam in conducting what looked to be a fierce and ongoing war with communist North Vietnam. In 1961, after two decades of indirect military aid, U.S. President John F. Kennedy sent the first large force of U.S. military personnel to support the ineffectual autocratic regime of South Vietnam against the communist North. Three years later, with the South Vietnamese government crumbling, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered limited bombing raids on North Vietnam, and Congress authorized the use of U.S. troops. By 1965, North Vietnamese offensives left President Johnson with two...