IS APRIL A CURSED MONTH

This has been copied from Robyn Moon’s Blog (with her permission) to reach more people!

I was born on the 15^th April and many events in history have occurred on that date or in the month of April. The sign of Aries in Astrology is much misrepresented and misunderstood, I feel, although I could be prejudiced. April 15 is the 105^th day of the year (106^th in a leap year) with 260 days remaining to the end of the year.

Some of the events that happened on April 15 are as follows:

1205 – Battle at Adrianople: Bulgaria beats Emperor Boudouin of Constantinople
1250 – Pope Innocent III refuses Jews of Cordova Spain to build a synagogue
1450 – French defeat English at Battle of Formigny in 100 Years’ War
1581 – Cortes van Thomar accepts Philip II as king of Portugal
1632 – Swedish & Saxon army beat Earl Tilly
1632 – Battle of Rain; Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus defeat the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years’ War.
1654 – England & Netherlands signs peace treaty
1689 – French king Louis XIV declares war on Spain
1697 – Charles XII succeeds Charles XI as King of Sweden
1715 – Uprising of Yamasse-indians in South Carolina
1715 – Pocotaligo Massacre triggers the start of the Yamasee War in colonial South Carolina.
1716 – Russian & Prussian troops occupy Wismar
1776 – Duchess of Kingston found guilty of bigamy
1788 – England, Netherlands & Prussia sign peace treaty
1802 – William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy see a “long belt” of daffodils, inspiring the former to pen I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.
1851 – Earl G Andressy sentenced to death in Hungary
1858 – Battle of Azimghur, Mexicans defeat Spanish loyalists
1861 – Federal army (75,000 volunteers) mobilized by Pres Lincoln
1864 – General Steeles’ Union troops occupies Camden, Arkansas
1865 – Otto von Bismarck elevated to rank of Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen
1912 – Titanic sinks at 2:27 AM off Newfoundland as band plays on
1918 – Clemenceau publishes secret French/Austrian documents
1921 – Black Friday- Labour Party strike of mine workers fails
1922 – Banting, MacLeod & Best discover insulin
1923 – 1st sound on film public performance shown at Rialto Theater (NYC)
1923 – Insulin becomes generally available for diabetics
1924 – Flemish-Walloon riots in Louvain Belgium, 1 dead
1927 – Switzerland & USSR agree to diplomatic relations
1939 – Albert Lebrun elected president of France
1940 – British troops land at Narvik, Norway
1942 – George VI awards George Cross to people of Malta
1945 – British Army liberates Nazi concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen
1945 – FDR buried on grounds of Hyde Park home
1945 – US troops occupy concentration camp Colditz
1948 – 1st Jewish-Arab military battle, arabs defeated
1952 – US performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site
1955 – Ray Kroc starts McDonald’s chain of fast food restaurants (Illinois)
1955 – US performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site

• At 11.40PM on the 14^th April 1912, on her maiden voyage, the RM Titanic hit an iceberg which ruptured the hull letting in water. Two hours and forty minutes later, at 2:20 AM April 15^th, she sank killing 1500 people.

• 1927, 15 inches of rain fell causing the Mississippi Rive to break its levees at 145 locations causing floods in 10 states of the USA.
• 1942 the people of Malta are awarded the George Cross by King George VI
• 1945 British troops liberated the German Bergen/Belsen Concentration camp finding thousands of corpses and thousands of sick and starving prisoners.
• 1945 Franklin D Roosevelt buried on grounds of Hyde Park home.
• 1945 US troops occupy Colditz concentration camp.
• 1967 180,000 in New York and San Francisco protested the Vietnam War.
• 1969 North Korea shoots at US airplane above Japanese sea.
• 1977 Roman Polanski, film director, pleaded innocent of drug rape of 13 year old girl.
• 1978 43 die as two express trains collide head on south of Bologna Italy.
• 1986 US launches air strikes on Libya in retaliation of the bombing of La Belle discotheque in West Berlin.
• 1988 a meteorite exploded above Indonesia.
• 1989 England’s Hillsborough Stadium disaster occurred when 96 people were crushed to death and a further 766 more were injured.
• 1995 in San Diego, California, a 36 year old graduate engineering student killed three professors.
• 2010 President Obama announced that astronauts would be sent to Mars by the mid 2030’s.
• 2011 In a Schrodinger’s cat experiment, researchers in Japan and Australia teleported wave packets of light, the first transfer of quantum information from one point to another.
• In Paris France candles caused a fire at a Paris Hotel which provided temporary accommodation, killing 24 people, 10 of whom were children.
• Near Pusan, South Korea, 2002, an Air China Boeing 767 crashed into a hillside killing around 115 people. 39 passengers survived.
• 65 killed and over 60,000 displaced after devastating floods in Namibia.

Famous Birthdays

1452 – Leonardo da Vinci, Italy, painter/sculptor/scientist/visionary
1469 – Nanak, 1st guru of Sikhs
1646 – King Christian V of Denmark (d. 1699)
1646 – Pierre Poiret, French mystic (d. 1719)
1684 – Catherine I, empress of Russia (1725-27)
1741 – Charles Willson Peale, US, port painter/inventor (George Washington)
1793 – Friedrich Struve, Germany, founded dynasty of astronomers
1812 – Pierre-Etienne-Theodore Rousseau, painter
1820 – Evander McNair, Brigadier General (Confederate Army), died in 1902
1821 – Emerson Brown Joseph, (Confederacy), died in 1894
1822 – Napolean Jackson Tecumseh Dana, Major General (Union volunteers)
1829 – Mary Harris Thompson, 1st American woman surgeon
1837 – Horace Porter, Bvt Brigadier General (Union Army), died in 1921
1841 – Joseph E. Seagram, Canadian distillery founder (d. 1919)
1858 – Anton G O Ridder Van Rappard, Dutch painter/lithographer/etcher
1874 – Johannes Stark, Germany, physicist (Stark effect) (Nobel 1919)
1874 – George Harrison Shull, American plant geneticist (d. 1954)
1883 – Stanley Bruce, eighth Prime Minister of Australia (d. 1967)
1885 – Tadeusz Kutrzeba, Polish general (d. 1947)
1892 – Corrie ten Boom, Dutch author and Holocaust survivor (d. 1983)
1892 – Theo Osterkamp, World War I and World War II German fighter pilot (d. 1975)
1894 – Elizabeth Mae “Bessie” Smith, Empress of Blues (over 200 songs)
1894 – Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, Kalinovka, Dmitriyevsky Uyezd, Kursk Governorate, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1953-64)
1896 – Nikolay Nikolayevich Semyonov, Russian chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1986)
1903 – John Williams, England, actor (Niles-Family Affair, Dial M for Murder)
1904 – Arshile Gorky, Armenian Artist (d. 1948)
1910 – Lord Grey of Naunton, chancellor (Ulster University)
1912 – Kim II Sung, pres of North Korea (1945-94)
1915 – Ernest Borneman, sexual researcher psychotherapist writer/musicologist
1916 – Alfred S. Bloomingdale, American businessman (d. 1982)
1921 – Georgi Timofeyevich Beregovoi, USSR, cosmonaut (Soyuz 3)
1922 – Harold Washington, 1st black mayor of Chicago (D, 1983-87)
1922 – Michael Ansara, Lowell Mass, actor (Cochise-Broken Arrow, Centennial)
1924 – John Grigg, British historian

Famous Deaths

1605 – Boris Godunov, tsar of Russia (1598-1605), dies
1621 – John Carver, first governor of Plymouth Colony
1632 – George Calvert, Proprietor of the Avalon (Maryland) Colony (b. 1580)
1641 – Domenico Zampieri, Italian painter (b. 1581)
1719 – Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon, second wife of Louis XIV of France (b. 1635)
1764 – Jeanne-Antoinette-Poison LeNormant d’Etoiles, Marquis de Pomador, dies
1764 – Madame de Pompadour, mistress of King Louis XV of France (b. 1721)
1804 – Charles Pichegru, French general (strangled in prison) (b. 1761)
1853 – Johann Leopold Fuchs, composer, dies at 67
1888 – Matthew Arnold, English poet, dies at 65
1898 – Kepa Te Rangihiwinui, Maori military leader
1912 – Edward Smith, captain of the RMS Titanic (b. 1850)
1912 – John Jacob Astor IV, billionaire (b. 1864)
1925 – John Singer Sargent, US portrait painter, dies at 69
1927 – Francesco Gaeta, Italian poet (Di Giacomo), dies at 47
1949 – Wallace Beery, US actor (The Champ), dies at 64
1975 – Richard Conte, actor (Four Just Men, Jean Arthur Show), dies at 65
1980 – Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialist philosopher and writer (Nobel 1964), dies in Paris at 74
1982 – 5 murderers, of Egyptian president Sadat, executed
1982 – Arthur Lowe, Brits actor (Capt Mainwaring in Dad’s army), dies at 66
1982 – Louis M de Guiringaud, French foreign minister (1976-78), commits suicide at 70
1990 – Greta Garbo, actress (Anna Karenina, Camille), dies at 84

There are many more events, births and deaths for April 15^th that I have eliminated for the purpose of keeping this relatively short. One more of significance was Dodi Fayad, full name, Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayad, born April 15 1955 in Alexandria, Egypt. Dodi was involved with Princess Diana when they met their deaths in a Paris tunnel on 31^st August 1997.

Other events occurring in April………….

14/4/2010 – Wisconsin and Minnesota sky watchers witnessed a brilliant green fireball strike across the sky.

A solar wind gust hit Earth’s magnetic field on April 15^th sparking a geomagnetic storm, with skies over Finland lit up with a mix of green of purple.

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake on April 18^th was around 7.9 on the Richter scale and was felt in Los Angeles, Oregon and Nevada.  Approx. 3000 people were killed and up to 300,000 left homeless.

The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident which occurred on April 26^th 1986 with devastating radiation. Over 350,000 were evacuated and it is unknown how many deaths this event caused.

On April 15^th 1961 President Kennedy made an abortive attack on Cuba. April 17^th 1961 Cuban exiles launched a botched invasion of the Bay of Pigs on the south coast of Cuba.

The American Civil War (1861-1865)

Hostilities began on April 12^th 1861 when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina. General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox on April 9^th 1865.

April 20^th 2009 the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico causing a massive oil leak.

2005 a deadly outbreak of Marburg, a haemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola, killed more than 280 people in Angola.

April 9th 2005 more than 150 pilgrims in India who were gathered at the river, were killed when a dam upstream was opened without warning.

April 7th 2005 a garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed killing 73.

April 25th 2005 107 people were killed and 460 injured when a commuter train derailed and hit an apartment building in Osaka, Japan.

April 28^th 35 people killed when a commuter train hit a bus on a crossing in Sri Lanka.

April 11^th 2001 43 fans were killed at Ellis Park Stadium, Johannesburg, South Africa, when around 30,000 extra fans tried to get into the already full stadium of 60,000 capacity.

April 16^th 2007 Virginia Tech, USA Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and injured 23 others before committing suicide in a deadly massacre.

April 18^th 1983 An Islamic radical detonated a vehicular bomb on the US Embassy in Lebanon killing 63 people.

April 9 – 10^th 1968, two storms merged over Wellington in New Zealand. The hurricane force winds forced the Wellington ferry, T.E.V. Wahine onto Barrett’s Reef killing 51 people.

Floods in many parts of the world in April caused many deaths with 85 dead and 29.000 displaced in Colombia due to La Nina.

On April 28^th 1996, Martin Bryant, a 28 year old from New Town in Hobart, Tasmania, went on a killing spree which resulted in 35 dead and 21 wounded. The Port Arthur massacre is one of the deadliest shootings in the world committed by a single person.

April 16^th 1746 was the Battle of Culloden between Charles Edward Stuart’s Jacobites and the Duke of Cumberland. The Jacobites were defeated with around 2000 dead and wounded. On the 15^th April an abortive attempt was made on a night attack on the government encampment but due to miscommunication it failed.

20^th April 1889 Adolf Hitler was born and committed suicide on the 30^th April 1945.

19^th April 1993 the Waco siege ended violently 50 days after it began on February 28^th 1993 at the Branch Davidian (leader David Koresh) ranch at Mount Carmel. When fire destroyed the compound, 76 people died.

19^th April 1995 was the date of the Oklahoma City bombing, a terrorist attack which was the most destructive act of terrorism on American soil until the September 11 2001 attacks. 168 people lost their lives including 19 children under the age of 6, and more than 680 people were injured. Timothy McVeigh, born April 23^rd 1968 was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001. Timothy McVeigh was motivated by a hatred of the federal government and angered at the mishandling of the Waco Siege he timed the attack for the second anniversary of the Waco Siege.

13^th April 2010 a deadly earthquake struck the remote Qinghai region of China leaving thousands of people homeless. An estimated 617 people died and 9980 injured as a result of the quake.

From 14-20 April 2010 ash covered much of northern Europe after the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland. It caused major disruptions to air travel in over 20 countries for many months.

March 29^th, April 3^rd and 4^th 1982 the El Chich’on volcano in Southern Mexico erupted with many deaths, causing a cloud of volcanic gases and particles to circle the earth near the equator which lasted for around six months.

So there you have it! Is April a cursed month?