Today is Easter Sunday, April 1, the 91st day of 2018. There are 274 days left in the year. This is April Fool’s Day.
►Birthdays: Actress Jane Powell is 89. Actor Don Hastings is 84. Baseball Hall of Famer Phil Niekro is 79. Actress Ali MacGraw is 79. Rhythm-and-blues singer Rudolph Isley is 79. Reggae singer Jimmy Cliff is 70. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is 68. Rock musician Billy Currie (Ultravox) is 68. Actress Annette O’Toole is 66. Movie director Barry Sonnenfeld is 65. Singer Susan Boyle is 57. Political commentator Rachel Maddow is 45. Tennis player Magdalena Maleeva is 43. Actor David Oyelowo is 42. Actor JJ Field is 40. Singer Bijou Phillips is 38. Actor Sam Huntington is 36. Comedian-actor Taran Killam is 36. Actor Matt Lanter is 35. Actor Josh Zuckerman is 33. Country singer Hillary Scott (Lady Antebellum) is 32. Actor Asa Butterfield is 21.
In 1789, the U.S. House of Representatives held its first full meeting in New York.
In 1933, Nazi Germany staged a daylong national boycott of Jewish-owned businesses.
In 1954, the United States Air Force Academy was established by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In 1972, the first Major League Baseball players’ strike began; it lasted 12 days.
In 1983, tens of thousands of antinuclear demonstrators linked arms in a 14-mile human chain spanning three defense installations in rural England, including the Greenham Common US Air Base.
In 1984, recording star Marvin Gaye was shot to death by his father, Marvin Gay Sr., in Los Angeles. The elder Gay pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, and received probation.
In 1988, the scientific bestseller ‘‘A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes,’’ by British physicist Stephen Hawking, was first published in the United Kingdom and the United States by Bantam Books.
In 1992, the National Hockey League Players’ Association went on its first-ever strike, which lasted 10 days.
In 2008, the Pentagon made public a legal memo dated March 14, 2003 that approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, saying that President George W. Bush’s wartime authority trumped any international ban on torture. (The memo was rescinded in December 2003.)
In 2017, Bob Dylan received his Nobel Literature diploma and medal during a small gathering in Stockholm, where he was visiting to perform a concert.
