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ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
1598 King Henry IV of France signed the Edict of Nantes, granting rights to the Protestant Huguenots.
1742 George Frideric Handel's ''Messiah'' was first performed publicly, in Dublin, Ireland.
1743 Thomas Jefferson, statesman and third president of the United States, was born in Virginia.
1870 The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in New York City.
1943 President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial.
1954 Baseball hall-of-famer Hank Aaron made his major league debut with the Milwaukee Braves.
1964 Sidney Poitier became the first black performer in a leading role to win an Academy Award, for ''Lilies of the Field.''
On April 13, 1970, Apollo 13, four-fifths of the way to the moon, was crippled when a tank containing liquid oxygen burst.
1981 Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke received a Pulitzer Prize for a feature about an 8-year-old heroin addict. Cooke relinquished the prize two days later, admitting she had fabricated the story.
1986 Pope John Paul II visited a Rome synagogue in the first recorded papal visit of its kind.
1990 The Soviet Union accepted responsibility for the World War II murders of thousands of imprisoned Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, a massacre the Soviets had previously blamed on the Nazis.
1997 Tiger Woods, 21, became the youngest person to win the Masters Tournament and the first person of African heritage to claim a major golf title.
1998 NationsBank and BankAmerica announced a $62.5 billion merger.
1999 Jack Kervorkian was sentenced in Pontiac, Mich., to 10 to 25 years in prison for the second-degree murder of a man whose assisted suicide in 1998 was videotaped and shown on ''60 Minutes.''
2002 Venezuela's interim president, Pedro Carmona, resigned a day after taking office in the face of protests by thousands of supporters of the ousted president, Hugo Chavez.
2004 Barry Bonds hit his 661st homer, passing Willie Mays to take sole possession of third place on baseball's career list.
'Mornin all.
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