Today in History for April 7:
In 1199, King Richard I of England (also known as ``The Lion-Heart'') died in the Limousin region of France at age 41 after being mortally wounded by an arrow.
In 1250, Louis IX of France, later dubbed Saint Louis, was captured by Egyptian Muslims during his ill-fated Crusade.
In 1506, the renowned Christian missionary Francis Xavier, later to become a disciple of Ignatius Loyola, a teacher in India and a saint, was born in the Spanish kingdom of Navarre.
In 1770, English poet William Wordsworth was born.
In 1795, the metric system was officially adopted by the French government. Gabriel Mouton, vicar of a church in Lyons, is considered the father of the decimal system of measurement. Over the years, his work was revised, improved, and extended by a number of French scientists.
In 1859, Walter Camp, the ``Father of American Football,'' was born in New Britain, Conn.
In 1868, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, one of the most brilliant orators in Canadian parliamentary history, was assassinated in Ottawa by a member of the Fenian Brotherhood. The Irish-born Father of Confederation worked as a journalist and poet before first being elected to the Canadian legislature in 1858. He denounced the Fenians, a militant Irish-American group dedicated to securing Irish independence. His assassin, Patrick James Whelan, was convicted and hanged the following year.
In 1891, American showman P.T. Barnum died at the age 80.
In 1927, an audience in New York saw an image of U.S. Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover in the first successful long-distance demonstration of television.
In 1933, alcohol became legal in the United States as Prohibition ended.
In 1939, Italy invaded Albania, which offered only token resistance. A few days later, Italy annexed the country.
In 1945, Americans sank six Japanese warships near Okinawa in the Ryukya Islands.
In 1947, auto pioneer Henry Ford died in Dearborn, Mich., at the age 83.
In 1948, the World Health Organization, a United Nations agency, was founded.
In 1953, Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden was elected secretary-general of the United Nations. He served until his death in a 1961 plane crash in Africa.
In 1957, the last of New York City's electric trolleys completed its final run.
In 1977, the Toronto Blue Jays played their inaugural regular season game. After a pre-game snowstorm at Exhibition Stadium, the Blue Jays got two home runs from first baseman Doug Ault in beating the visiting Chicago White Sox 9-5.
In 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev offered to freeze medium-range missile deployments in Europe. He also suggested a meeting with U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
In 1989, a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine caught fire and sank off Norway.
In 1992, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat survived the crash of his plane in the Libyan desert. Three crew members died.
In 1994, civil war erupted in Rwanda, a day after a plane crash claimed the lives of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. In the ensuing months, hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsi and Hutu intellectuals were slaughtered.
In 2000, a landmark ruling by a Miami jury ordered the American tobacco industry to pay US$6.9 million to two smokers with cancer.
In 2004, the Canadian government imposed an immediate ban on the sale, resale, advertisement and importation of baby walkers, becoming the first country to do so.
In 2004, Mounir el Motassadeq, the only Sept. 11th suspect ever convicted, was freed after a German court ruled that the evidence was too weak to hold him pending a retrial. On Jan. 8, 2007, he was sentenced to serve 15 years in prison.
In 2005, Ibrahim Jaafari was named as Iraq's next prime minister, hours after the country's new interim president was sworn in.
In 2006, the European Union cut off direct aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian government because of its refusal to renounce violence and recognize Israel.
In 2008, a British jury ruled that Diana, the Princess of Wales, and her companion Dodi Fayed, were unlawfully killed due to reckless speed and drinking by their driver, and by the reckless pursuit of paparazzi chasing them.
In 2008, the federal government signed a deal with the Dene and Metis to create a national park around the headwaters of the South Nahanni River in the Northwest Territories. It would be called the Naats'ihch'oh National Park Reserve.
In 2008, Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean opened a national memorial centre in Ottawa commemorating Canada's fallen heroes and everyday people. The 1,300-square-metre facility, alongside the national police and military cemeteries, will also honour the country's army, navy and air force veterans, as well as RCMP and other police, with a hall of military colours, a memorial window and educational facilities.
In 2009, former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison for death squad killings and kidnappings as his autocratic government battled the Shining Path insurgency in the 1990s.
In 2010, a deal between Ottawa and northern aboriginals put 3.3 million hectares of land off the east arm of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories firmly on the road to becoming Canada's next national park.
In 2010, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made an unprecedented gesture of goodwill to Poland by becoming the first Russian leader to attend a memorial ceremony for the Katyn massacre where 22,000 Polish officers, prisoners and intellectuals were massacred by Stalin's secret police in 1940.
In 2011, a 23-year-old gunman opened fire at his former elementary school in Rio de Janeiro killing 10 girls and two boys aged 12 to 15 before he was shot in the legs by police and then took his own life.
In 2012, CBS newsman Mike Wallace, who helped make ``60 Minutes'' the most successful primetime television news program ever, died at the age 93.
In 2012, an avalanche smashed into a Pakistani army base on a Himalayan glacier along the Indian border, burying 140 military and civilian personnel.
In 2013, Halifax-area teenager Rehteah Parsons was taken off life support after a suicide attempt three days earlier. Her family said Parsons, 17, struggled with depression after a photograph of her alleged sexual assault by four boys at a house party in 2011 was distributed online.
In 2014, Philippe Couillard led the Liberals to a majority win in the Quebec election, as voters rebuffed the incumbent Parti Quebecois agenda for a possible third sovereignty referendum and its divisive secular charter. PQ leader Pauline Marois lost her riding and resigned, just 18 months after coming to power with a minority government.
In 2018, a poison gas attack in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma killed 40 people. On April 14, the U.S., Britain and France blasted three Syrian government targets with 105 cruise missiles in fiery retaliation for the gruesome attack.
In 2019, world-renowned Canadian pioneer of heart surgery and former senator Dr. Wilbert Keon died in Ottawa at the age of 83. He founded the University of Ottawa Heart Institute and in 1986 performed Canada's first artificial-heart implantation, which was revolutionary for the time. On May 1, 1986, Keon made medical history when he inserted the Jarvik-7 artificial heart into Noella Leclair, who had suffered her first heart attack the week before, during a three-and-a-half-hour operation. The artificial heart helped bridge Leclair, then 41, for a week until she received a human heart from a 44-year-old man who died in a car accident. She lived another 20 years. Keon performed more than 10,000 open-heart surgeries during a career that spanned more than three decades.
In 2019, Canadians marked the first Green Shirt Day - a national day to promote organ donation on the anniversary of the death of Humboldt Broncos' player Logan Boulet. He was one of the 16 people killed in the Saskatchewan hockey team's bus crash. News that six people benefited from his organs sparked what became known as the Logan Boulet Effect - a flood of blood donations and people signing organ donor cards.
In 2019, Federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer called a news conference to denounce a threatened lawsuit against him for libel as being ``without merit.'' He also challenged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to follow through on the threat, and testify in open court. Trudeau's suit alleged Scheer libelled him with his assertion that the prime minister politically interfered with the criminal prosecution of Montreal engineering giant S-N-C-Lavalin.
In 2020, a woman in her 70's became the first person in Nova Scotia whose death was linked to COVID-19. Health officials said the woman had underlying medical conditions and died in a hospital in the eastern part of the province. Premier Stephen McNeil offered his condolences to the woman's family and friends, saying he had hoped this day would never come.
In 2020, Canada's chief medical officer clarified how wearing non-surgical face masks could protect others from contracting COVID-19. Dr. Theresa Tam said that while wearing face coverings could prevent an asymptomatic person from spreading the virus unknowingly, not everyone should be wearing them.
In 2020, singer-songwriter John Prine, the musician behind the hit as ``Angel from Montgomery,'' died from complications from COVID-19. He was 73. Prine received a lifetime achievement Grammy earlier in the year. In 2017, Rolling Stone proclaimed him ``The Mark Twain of American songwriting.''
In 2022, Canadian photographer Amber Bracken won the prestigious World Press Photo award for a haunting image of red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside, with a rainbow in the background. The crosses were put up to honour children who died at the Kamloops Residential School in B.C. One of the judges said it is the kind of image that sears itself into your memory.
In 2022, the United Nations General Assembly voted to suspend Russia from the UN's Human Rights Council. The vote was fuelled by allegations that Russian soldiers had engaged in war crimes and human rights violations in Ukraine.
In 2022, the U.S. Senate confirmed the first Black female justice to America's highest court. Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed as a member of the Supreme Court by a vote of 53-47.
In 2024, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced $2.4 billion to build Canada's artificial intelligence capacity, to provide access to computing capabilities and technical infrastructure.
----
The Canadian Press