Today in History for April 4:
In 1507, Martin Luther was ordained a priest in Erfurt, Germany.
In 1541, Spanish theologian Ignatius of Loyola was elected the first general of the Jesuit order, or the Society of Jesus, which he had founded the previous year.
In 1617, Scottish mathematician John Napier, who invented the concept of logarithms, died.
In 1784, New Brunswick's first recorded wedding took place in Parrtown (now Saint John).
In 1818, the U.S. Congress decided the flag of the United States would consist of 13 red and white stripes and 20 stars, with a new star to be added for every new state of the Union.
In 1841, U.S. President William Henry Harrison succumbed to pneumonia one month after his inaugural, becoming the first U.S. chief executive to die in office.
In 1850, the city of Los Angeles was incorporated.
In 1858, the Fraser River gold rush began in British Columbia.
In 1887, the first colonial conference was held in London. It was the forerunner of Commonwealth prime ministers conferences.
In 1893, Ontario's legislative building, Queen's Park, opened on the site of what once was a lunatic asylum.
In 1896, news of the Yukon's Klondike gold strike reached the outside world.
In 1902, British financier and African colonialist Cecil Rhodes left $10 million in his will for scholarships at Oxford University. Residents of Canada and the United States are among those eligible.
In 1904, the Berliner Gramophone Company of Canada was chartered. The company was run by Emile Berliner, the inventor of the gramophone. He set up a manufacturing facility for his talking machine in Montreal in 1897, and began making records there three years later.
In 1917, women in B.C. were given the right to vote.
In 1935, Canada's first silver dollar was minted.
In 1939, Canada recognized the Spanish government of General Francisco Franco, a few days after the end of the Spanish civil war.
In 1947, the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency, was established. Its headquarters are in Montreal.
In 1949, Canada and 11 other countries formed NATO -- the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
In 1957, Canada's ambassador to Egypt, Herbert Norman, committed suicide in Cairo. He had undergone years of scrutiny by an anti-communist U.S. Senate committee and the RCMP. Suspicions against him proved groundless.
In 1967, Roland Michener, a diplomat and former House of Commons Speaker, was named Canada's 20th governor general.
In 1968, American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn. The Baptist minister received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for his civil rights work. Word of King's death set off riots in dozens of American cities. Prison escapee James Earl Ray was arrested a few months later in London. He confessed to the shooting and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. But Ray recanted three days later and spent the rest of his life seeking a new trial. He died of liver disease on April 23, 1998 at the age of 70.
In 1974, tornadoes and related storms hit 13 southern and midwestern American states and Ontario, killing 318 people.
In 1975, more than 130 people, most of them children, died when a U.S. air force transport plane crashed shortly after takeoff from Saigon. The crash occurred during the evacuation of Vietnamese orphans, dubbed ``Operation Babylift.''
In 1981, Susan Brown became the first female to participate in the 152-year-old Oxford-Cambridge boat race.
In 1983, the space shuttle ``Challenger'' roared into orbit on its maiden voyage.
In 1993, Alfred Butts died at age 93. While an unemployed architect in Rhinebeck, N.Y., in 1931, he invented the board game ``Scrabble.''
In 2003, Cpl. Bernard Gooden, 22, tank gunner with the U.S. Marines, became the first Canadian to be killed in combat in the war in Iraq.
In 2005, Edward Bronfman, who with his brother Peter developed a business empire that branched into much of the Canadian economy, died at age 77. Edward and Peter had been excluded from the Seagram liquor fortune by their uncle, Samuel, so, with Toronto as their base, the two built their own empire with holdings ranging from Royal Trust, London Life and the real estate broker Royal LePage to forest company MacMillan Bloedel, brewer Labatt and the Montreal Canadiens of the NHL.
In 2008, Pte. Terry John Street, 24, of Gatineau, Que., a member of the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, based in Shilo, Man., was killed by a roadside bomb in Kandahar province in Afghanistan.
In 2008, a massive blaze destroyed the historic armoury in Quebec City, built in 1884. But all archives dating back to the Northwest Rebellion led by Louis Riel in 1885, and the First and Second World Wars, were saved.
In 2009, Johnson Aziga, 52, of Hamilton, Ont., was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, 10 counts of aggravated sexual assault and one count of attempted aggravated sexual assault. Aziga was accused of transmitting HIV by having unprotected sex with co-workers and women he met in bars and nightclubs. He is believed to be the first person in Canada convicted of murder through HIV transmission. In 2011, he was declared a dangerous offender which keeps him behind bars indefinitely.
In 2009, Paul Gross's First World War epic movie, ``Passchendaele,'' dominated the 29th Genie Awards in Ottawa, winning six statues including best picture. Inuit actor Natar Ungalaaq, won for best performance in ``The Necessities of Life'' and Oscar-winner and American actress Ellen Burstyn won best actress for her work in ``The Stone Angel.''
In 2009, dozens of doctors working in teams over 30 hours performed the world's first simultaneous partial-face and double-hand transplant at Paris' Public Hospital. The recipient was a 30-year-old burn victim, whose 2004 accident left him with scars preventing any social life.
In 2011, B.C. teens Cameron Alexander Moffatt and Kruse Hendrick Wellwood were sentenced as adults and given automatic life sentences with no possibility of parole for 10 years for the rape and horrific murder of 18-year-old Kimberly Proctor in March, 2010.
In 2012, 23-year-old transgender Vancouverite Jenna Talackova, originally barred from the Miss Universe Canada Pageant because she was born a male, won her fight to participate. At the competition on May 19, she made it into the top-12.
In 2012, five former New Orleans police officers were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to 65 years for their roles in shooting six unarmed residents, killing two, on a bridge in the chaotic days following Hurricane Katrina.
In 2013, Roger Ebert, the most famous film reviewer of his time who become the first journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for movie criticism and, on his long-running TV program, was known for his trademark thumbs-up or thumbs-down reviews, died at age 70.
In 2013, 74 people were killed in the collapse of an eight-story residential building being constructed illegally near Mumbai, India's financial capital.
In 2016, voters delivered Premier Brad Wall and his Saskatchewan Party a resounding three-peat majority victory in the provincial election taking 51 seats in the 61-seat legislature. The New Democrats added only one seat to their pre-election total of nine, but leader Cam Broten lost his riding.
In 2017, a sarin gas attack in the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun killed at least 86 people, including 27 children, in one of the worst poison gas attacks in the country's six-year civil war. Two days later, two American warships blasted a Syrian government air base with almost 60 cruise missiles in fiery retaliation for the gruesome attack.
In 2019, the preliminary report on the Ethiopian Airlines jet crash points to faulty readings by a key sensor. It is drawing the strongest link yet between the March 10th crash in Ethiopia and October's Lion Air crash off the coast of Indonesia. The report also said the Ethiopian Airlines pilots followed Boeing's recommended procedures when the plane started to nose dive. It now appeared that sensors malfunctioned on both planes. Boeing issued a statement repeating that it was working on a software update.
In 2022, the House of Commons unanimously adopted a motion to condemn "crimes against humanity and war crimes'' by Russian forces in the city of Bucha, Ukraine. The federal New Democrats put forth the motion.
In 2024, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization celebrated its 75th birthday.
In 2024, Canada's top court dismissed an appeal by Ticketmaster and Live Nation in class-action lawsuits in multiple provinces accusing the ticket sellers of profiting from third-party ticket reselling. The case stems from allegations Ticketmaster facilitated mass ticket scalping by allowing resellers to use automated "ticket bots" to scoop up event tickets beyond limits it imposes on individual buyers.
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The Canadian Press