Today is Thursday, April 3, the 93rd day of 2025
with 272 to follow.
The moon is waxing. Morning stars are Jupiter, Mars and Venus. Evening stars are Jupiter, Mars and Uranus.
On this date in history:
In 1860, the Pony Express postal service began, with riders leaving St. Joseph, Mo., and Sacramento at the same time.
In 1865, as the Civil War drew to a close, Richmond, Va., and nearby Petersburg surrendered to Union forces.
In 1882, outlaw Jesse James was shot to death by Robert Ford, a former gang member who hoped to collect the reward on James' head.
In 1936, Richard Bruno Hauptmann was executed for killing the 20-month-old son of Charles A. Lindbergh.
In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established Isle Royale National Park, a cluster of islands in Lake Superior situated between Michigan and Canada.
In 1944, in a case out of Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that barring Black Americans from voting violated the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In 1948, U.S. President Harry S. Truman signed the Marshall Plan, aimed to help European countries recover from World War II.
In 1989, Richard M. Daley was elected mayor of Chicago, the post his father, Richard J. Daley, had occupied for 21 years (1955-76). The new Mayor Daley was re-elected five times.
In 1991, the U.N. Security Council passed a cease-fire resolution to end the Persian Gulf War.
In 1995, owners and players of Major League Baseball approved an agreement ending a 232-day strike that forced the cancellation of hundreds of games and the 1994 World Series.
In 1996, the FBI raided a Montana cabin and arrested Theodore Kaczynski, a former college professor, accusing him of being the "Unabomber" whose mail bombs had killed three people and injured 23 since the 1970s. Kaczynski was sentenced to life in prison.
In 1996, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and 32 other Americans died when their plane crashed into a mountain in Croatia.
In 2000, the Department of Justice ruled that Microsoft had become a monopoly and in the process, had violated U.S. antitrust law. Four months later the court ordered the breakup of the technology company.
In 2010, Apple released the first generation of its iPad and within a month had sold more than 1 million devices.
In 2016, the so-called Panama Papers, an unprecedented leak of millions of documents, revealed that politicians, prominent world leaders, and celebrities hid millions in secret offshore tax shelters to skirt tax laws.
In 2019, San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich was ejected after a record-setting 63 seconds into a loss against the Denver Nuggets.
In 2024, nine people died and nearly 1,000 were injured in a 7.4-magnitude earthquake in Hualien, Taiwan.
