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1964: Poitier breaks new ground with Oscar win
The acting profession's top award has gone to a black actor for the first time.
Sidney Poitier won the best actor Oscar for his role in Lilies of the Field.
In the film, released last year, he played construction worker Homer Smith whom a group of nuns believe was sent to them by God to build their church.
The only other black person to win an Oscar was the best supporting actress award given to Hattie McDaniel in 1939 for her role in Gone with the Wind.
Alongside 'Rat Pack' actor Sammy Davis Jnr and, earlier, Paul Robeson, Poitier is one of only a handful of black men to gain recognition in Hollywood for roles not involving singing or dancing.
It has been a long journey to this moment
Sidney Poitier
It was the second time he had been in the running for an Oscar after losing out in 1959 when he was nominated for his part in The Defiant Ones.
"It has been a long journey to this moment," the actor said after he was presented with the prized statuette by actress Ann Bancroft.
Sidney Poitier's early life seemed unlikely to spawn a Hollywood star.
He grew up in poverty in the Bahamas in the Caribbean where his father was a tomato farmer.
In his first months in New York he was so poor he slept in the toilets of a bus station.
He was hampered in his efforts to break into acting by his strong Bahamian accent and was initially rejected by the American Negro Theatre.
His first film was No Way Out alongside Richard Widmark in 1950 in which he played a doctor.
But his big breakthrough came five years later in The Blackboard Jungle.
His roles have been a big move away from the stereotypical dim-witted Negro characters made famous in the 1930s and 1940s by Stepin Fetchit.
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It was Sidney Poitier's second nomination
Poitier discusses his life and work
In Context
Much of America was scandalised by the chaste congratulatory peck on the cheek Ann Bancroft gave Sidney Poitier when presenting his award.
Three years later the actor took part in the first on-screen interracial kiss in the film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
The film was among a string of hit movies Sidney Poitier starred in during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
They included In the Heat of the Night and the role for which Poitier is probably most famous, Detective Virgil Tibbs.
In 2002 Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won the best actor and best actress Oscars - the first black actors to win since Poitier.
At the same ceremony Sidney Poitier was given a lifetime achievement award.
Stories From 13 Apr
1975: Beirut street battle leaves 17 dead
1992: Labour's Neil Kinnock resigns
1989: Six killed in West Bank village raid
1975: 'Cambridge rapist' strikes again
1964: Poitier breaks new ground with Oscar win
1997: Tiger Woods wins Masters at 21
1796 - The first elephant was brought to the United States.
1829 – The British Parliament grants freedom of religion to Roman Catholics.
1870 - The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in New York City.
1919 - British forces killed hundreds of Indian nationalists in the Amritsar Massacre.
1953 – CIA director Allen Dulles launches the mind-control program
MKULTRA.
1960 – The United States launches Transit 1-B, the world's first satellite navigation system.
1970 - Apollo 13, very close to its destination, the Moon, was crippled when a tank containing liquid oxygen burst. The rest of the trip was spent getting the astronauts safely back to Earth.
1987 – Portugal and the People's Republic of China sign an agreement in which Macau would be returned to China in 1999.
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1970: Critical explosion cripples Apollo 13
An explosion on board Apollo 13 has caused one of the most critical situations in American space history and put the lives of the three astronauts on board in severe jeopardy.
The explosion happened in the fuel cells of the spacecraft's service module approximately 56 hours after lift-off.
This resulted in the loss of Apollo 13's main power supply which means oxygen and water reserves are now critically low.
The safety of the three astronauts, Captain James Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, is uncertain although Nasa is hoping emergency contingency plans will ensure their safe return.
Certain death
The cause of the explosion is not yet clear although it is understood it could have been the result of a meteorite crashing into the service module.
It is unlikely the exact cause will ever be ascertained as the service module will burn up before the spacecraft's re-entry into the earth's atmosphere.
The crew are currently surviving on the emergency battery power supply of the lunar module, Aquarius.
If the accident had occurred after the lunar module had been detached for the moon landing, the astronauts would have faced certain death.
The spacecraft's main computer has now been switched off to conserve what little power remains in the command module, Odyssey, as this part of the spacecraft will be required for re-entry into the earth's atmosphere.
Plans have been made to "slingshot" Apollo 13 around the Moon and fire the spacecraft's last remaining booster engine to take it away from the Moon's orbit and bring it back on course to Earth.
This is a highly risky operation and there is no back-up should anything go wrong.
If all goes to plan Apollo 13 is due to splash down at approximately 1900 BST on Friday 17 April.
Geological experiments
The Apollo 13 mission was to have been man's third Moon landing. The spacecraft was due to land in the Fra Mauro area of the Moon on Thursday 16 April.
Captain Lovell and Mr Haise were due to carry out geological experiments on the Moon's surface as part of an ongoing project to establish the true age of the Moon.
Rock samples taken from previous missions have been dated as being 4,500 million years old.
During the 33-hour Moon landing Mr Swigert would have been responsible for piloting the command module in lunar orbit.
Mr Swigert replaced Thomas Mattingly as command module pilot just hours before the mission began after it was found that Mr Mattingly had no immunity after exposure to German Measles.
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Captain James Lovell led the Apollo 13 mission
In Context
Apollo 13 successfully returned to Earth on Friday 17 April 1970.
The spacecraft entered the atmosphere 400,000 ft (121,920 metres) above the Earth and hurtled towards Earth at 25,000 mph (40,234 km/h).
The command capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 1907 BST. The lunar module and the service module had been jettisoned before re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.
Within three minutes of the capsule landing helicopters were on the scene.
The three astronauts were airlifted onto rescue boat Iwo Jima where they spent the night before flying to Samoa to be reunited with their families.
Stories From 14 Apr
1970: Critical explosion cripples Apollo 13
1988: USSR pledges to leave Afghanistan
2000: M25 killer gets life
1979: New president for war-torn Uganda
1968: Berlin student unrest worsens
BBCi Space>>
Overview and pictures of the 1970 Apollo 13 mission
1536 - Henry VIII dissolved the Reformation Parliament.
1865 - President Abraham Lincoln was shot and mortally wounded by John Wilkes Booth while attending a play at Ford's Theater in Washington, he died the next morning.
1894 – The first ever commercial motion picture house opened in New York City using ten Kinetoscopes, a device for peep-show viewing of films.
1912 - The British built luxury liner Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic shortly before midnight, and sank in the early hours of the next morning. 1500 passengers and crew were killed.
1983 - The first cordless telephone (able to operate up to 600 feet from base), was introduced. It was made by Fidelity and British Telecom and sold for £170.
1986 – 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) hailstones fall on the Gopalganj district of Bangladesh, killing 92. These are the heaviest hailstones ever recorded.
2003 – The Human Genome Project is completed with 99% of the human genome sequenced to an accuracy of 99.99%.
2010 – Nearly 2,700 are killed in a magnitude 6.9 earthquake in Yushu, Qinghai, China.
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1945: British troops liberate Bergen-Belsen
British troops have entered the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.
Inside the camp the horrified soldiers found piles of dead and rotting corpses and thousands of sick and starving prisoners kept in severely overcrowded and dirty compounds.
Belsen, near Hanover in Germany, is the first concentration camp to be liberated by the British. Details of the conditions inside are likely to horrify a public which until now has only heard limited descriptions from the camps in Poland freed by the Red Army.
The first British soldiers who entered Bergen-Belsen have described seeing a huge pile of dead, naked women's bodies within full view of several hundred children held at the camp.
From where we were, we could see the desperate plight of the inmates
People's War memories »
The gutters, too, were filled with dead bodies.
One of the reasons the Germans agreed to surrender Belsen was because so many of the inmates were diseased. There was no running water in the camp and there were epidemics of typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis.
There were thousands of sick women, who should have been in hospital, lying on hard, bare bug-ridden boards. Of the 1,704 acute typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis cases, only 474 women had bunks to sleep on.
There were fewer male prisoners, but they were also kept in severely overcrowded and dirty conditions.
One of the British senior medical officers, Brigadier Llewellyn Glyn- Hughes, told the Reuters news agency he saw evidence of cannibalism in the camp. There were bodies with no flesh on them and the liver, kidneys and heart removed.
He said their first priority was to remove the dead bodies from the camp. He was told some 30,000 people had died in the past few months.
He said typhus had caused far fewer deaths than starvation. Men and women had tried to keep themselves clean with dregs from coffee cups. Medical supplies were severely limited - there were no vaccines, or drugs and no treatments for lice.
The only food available for the prisoners was turnip soup and British guards had to fire over the heads of prisoners to restore order among those desperate to get at the food stores.
Those prisoners who were too weak to get up and collect their food went without and died.
The camp commandant, who was described as "unashamed" at the camp conditions, has been placed under arrest.
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German SS women were made to haul dead bodies into the mass graves
Richard Dimbleby describes the scene inside the camp
In Context
Bergen-Belsen was the only concentration camp taken by the British and the soldiers were unprepared for what they found there. In fact most of the details did not appear in the media until a couple of days after the liberation when the first medical team arrived.
Mass graves were dug to hold up to 5,000 corpses at a time. The former army guards from the SS were deliberately made to use their bare hands to bury the prisoners, many of whom had died of contagious diseases.
The mass evacuation of the camp began on 21 April. Prisoners with any hope of survival were moved to an emergency hospital.
British medical students responded to an appeal from the Ministry of Health to go to Germany and help in the treatment of prisoners.
Photographs and a film taken at the camp and published in the media brought home the full horror of life in Belsen. German civilians living near to the camp were taken to see what had gone on inside.
The last hut in the camp was burned to the ground on 21 May 1945. Today the camp is a landscaped park.
Brigadier Llewellyn Glyn-Hughes, who was put in charge of cleaning up the camp, said it took a staff of 68 a fortnight to stamp out typhus in the camp. But prisoners too sick to respond to treatment continued to die. Historians say as many as 28,000 of the 38,500 prisoners in the camp when it was liberated, subsequently died.
The camp commandant, Josef Kramer, was found guilty at Luneberg of war crimes and hanged in December 1945.
1755 - Dr Samuel Johnson's dictionary was first published. It contained explanations and meanings for 40,000 different words and had taken him almost 9 years to compile.
1793 - The Bank of England issued the first £5 notes.
1912 - The British built Titanic luxury ocean liner that had collided earlier with an iceberg about 400 miles from Newfoundland sank at 2:20 a.m. More than 1,500 people drowned or froze to death in the icy waters. Most of the 700 survivors were women and children.
1925 - Author James Barrie donated his copyright fee for the story of Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.
1989 - Britain's worst football disaster happened at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. 96 football fans were crushed to death shortly after the start of the FA Cup semi-final match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.
1999 - Astronomers from San Francisco State University (working in Arizona), announced the discovery of the first multi-planet system found orbiting around a star other than the Sun.
2010 – Volcanic ash from the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland leads to the closure of airspace over most of Europe.
(15-04-2011 09:03 )bombshell Wrote: [ -> ]The camp commandant, Josef Kramer, was found guilty at Luneberg of war crimes and hanged in December 1945.
Although convicted in Luneberg, Kramer's execution took place in the town of Hamelin, home of the fictional "Pied Piper".
He was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint, who had recently taken over from his uncle Thomas as Britain's Chief Executioner. The "A-List" Nazis who had been tried and convicted at Nuremberg had been hanged by an American, M/Sgt John Woods, but it was later revealed that some of the executions had been botched. The Americans used a standard, rather than a variable length of drop and this meant that some were not killed outright but were slowly strangled. Also, the equipment had been set up incorrectly, and several of the condemned had their noses ripped off as they fell through the trap. Julius Streiker* suffered both mishaps.
Although there was little sympathy for their sufferings, the Allies decided that Pierrepoint, who had already been a hangman for 20 years, would execute the second batch of condemned. He was given the honorary rank of Lt Colonel and flown to Germany to carry out the task.
Unusually, Kramer had been given permission to be executed wearing his full military uniform (the first group had been refused), and after the hanging Pierrepoint cut the epaulettes off his shoulders and kept them as a souvenir (they were later donated to the "Black Museum" in London).
The execution took place on December 13th 1945 and a few days before Xmas that year Pierrepoint received an envelope in the mail. Inside was a £5 note, and a slip of paper which said simply "for Belsen". There was no name or address, just a London postmark. Pierrepoint could only assume that it was a "thank you" from a survivor or relative for exacting justice on Kramer.
He was not to know that he would receive an identical, anonymous envelope containing nothing but a £5 note every Xmas for the next 27 years. They stopped in 1972, presumably with the death of the sender.
* this is true - Julius Stricher's last words were "Adele, my dear wife"!! 
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1964: 'Great Train Robbers' get 300 years
Some of the longest sentences in British criminal history have been imposed on men involved in the so-called "Great Train Robbery".
Sentences totalling 307 years were passed on 12 men who stole £2.6m in used bank notes after holding up the night mail train travelling from Glasgow to London last August.
The judge at Buckinghamshire Assizes in Aylesbury, Mr Justice Edmund Davies, said it would be "positively evil" if he showed leniency.
The robbery was the biggest-ever carried out in Britain.
The scale and style of the theft led to comparisons with rail robberies of the Wild West and the hunt for the perpetrators captured the public imagination.
But the judge said the robbers' crime had in no way been "romantic" and was obviously motivated by greed.
The attack on train driver Jack Mills was proof of their violent tendencies, he added.
"Anybody who has seen that nerve-shattered engine driver can have no doubt of the terrifying effect on law-abiding citizens of a concerted assault by armed robbers," the judge said.
Ringleader
Seven of the defendants - Ronald Biggs, Charles Wilson, Douglas Goody, Thomas Wisbey, Robert Welch, James Hussey and Roy James - were jailed for 30 years each.
Four were sent to prison for terms of between 20 and 25 years.
Another defendant, solicitor John Wheater, 41, was sent to prison for three years.
Wheater obtained the robbers hide-out - Leatherslade Farm in Bedfordshire.
Judge Davies said Wheater had no knowledge of the robbery until after it had been committed but should then have informed the police.
"I realise the consequences of your conviction are disastrous, professionally and personally," the judge told Wheater.
Three men involved in the robbery are still at large including the man said to be the ringleader, Bruce Reynolds.
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Ringleader Bruce Reynolds has so far evaded capture
In Context
All the three remaining gang members were eventually caught.
In 1969 the robbery's mastermind, Bruce Reynolds, was sentenced to 10 years in jail.
In the meantime two gang members had made dramatic escapes from prison.
One of them, Charlie Wilson, was recaptured in Canada in 1968.
The other, Ronnie Biggs, was free for nearly 40 years before he returned voluntarily to Britain from Brazil.
An impoverished Biggs, 71, came back to the UK in 2001 to receive free medical treatment after having suffered a series of strokes.
He was immediately taken to a top-security prison to serve the remaining 28 years of his sentence.
Stories From 16 Apr
1964: 'Great Train Robbers' get 300 years
1993: UN makes Srebrenica 'safe haven'
1970: Paisley victory rattles NI parliament
1987: MP on gay sex charges
1953: Queen launches Royal Yacht Britannia
BBC News >>
A look back at the events of the Great Train Robbery
1178 BC – The calculated date of the Greek king Odysseus' return home from the Trojan War.
1705 - Queen Anne of England knighted the scientist Isaac Newton at Trinity College, Cambridge.
1746 - Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) was defeated at the Battle of Culloden Moor by an English Army under the the command of William, Duke of Cumberland.
1917 - Vladimir Lenin, leader of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party, returned to Petrograd after a decade of exile to take the reins of the Russian Revolution.
1943 - The hallucinogenic effects of LSD were discovered accidentally by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman.
1945 – The United States Army liberates Nazi Sonderlager (high security) prisoner-of-war camp Oflag IV-C (better known as Colditz).
1953 - Queen Elizabeth II launched the Royal Yacht Britannia at Clydeside. It was used by the British Royal Family for state visits and diplomatic missions for the next 45 years.
1972 – Apollo program: The launch of Apollo 16 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
2003 – The Treaty of Accession is signed in Athens admitting 10 new member states to the European Union.
2004 – The super liner RMS Queen Mary 2 embarks on her first trans-Atlantic crossing, linking the golden age of ocean travel to the modern age of ocean travel.
1194 - Richard the Lionhearted returned to England and was crowned for the second time after his epic journey and victory in the Third Crusade.
1397 – Geoffrey Chaucer tells the Canterbury Tales for the first time at the court of Richard II.
1492 - Christopher Columbus and a representative of Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella signed a contract, giving Columbus a commission to seek a western route to the Indies.
1875 - The game snooker was invented by Sir Neville Chamberlain.
1924 – Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios is formed by the merger of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and the Louis B. Mayer Company.
1961 - About 1500 CIA-trained Cuban exiles launched the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in a failed attempt to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro.
1964 – The Ford Motor Company unveils the Ford Mustang at the New York World's Fair.
1964 - The British pop group The Rolling Stones released their first album.
1970 - The astronauts of Apollo 13 splashed down safely in the Pacific, after four days in a crippled spacecraft.