Reuters historical calendar - April 7
March 31 (Reuters) - Following are some of the major events to have occurred on April 7 since 1900:
1927 - The first successful long-distance demonstration of television took place in the United States. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover made a speech in Washington that was seen and heard in New York.
1939 - Italian troops invaded Albania.
1943 - The drug LSD was first produced at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, by Albert Hofmann.
1943 - Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met for a conference of the Axis alliance in Salzburg in World War Two.
1945 - U.S. aircraft sank Japan's biggest battleship, the Yamato.
1947 - Henry Ford, the U.S. motor manufacturer who pioneered assembly line mass production, died.
1953 - Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden was elected secretary-general of the United Nations.
1956 - Morocco and Spain signed a declaration recognising Morocco's independence.
1963 - The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was established with Marshal Tito as its president for life.
1976 - Deng Xiaoping was removed as a Chinese deputy prime minister after unprecedented riots in Beijing; Hua Guofeng was promoted to full premier.
1980 - U.S. President Jimmy Carter broke off diplomatic relations with Iran because of the detention of U.S. embassy hostages in Tehran.
1981 - Voters approved a new constitution in the Philippines, giving President Ferdinand Marcos sweeping powers.
1990 - The Scandinavian Star, a Bahamas-registered ferry operated by the Da No Line, caught fire while sailing from Norway to Denmark; 158 people were killed.
1994 - Rwandan Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana was killed as troops, presidential guards, police and gangs of youths rampaged through the capital Kigali.
2001 - NASA launched the Mars Odyssey from Cape Canaveral on a $297 million mission to search for water on Mars.
2003 - Cecile de Brunhoff, French pianist, teacher and creator of the children's character Babar the Elephant, died aged 99.
2004 - Robert Sangster, one of the world's top racehorse owners, whose green and blue colours won 27 European Classics and more than 100 Group One races, died aged 67.
2005 - India and Pakistan launched the first bus service in almost 60 years to link Indian-controlled Kashmir with Pakistani-controlled Kashmir.
2005 - Singer Grigoris Bithikotsis, the man widely regarded as the national voice of Greece, died aged 83.
2007 - The American software mogul Charles Simonyi, who helped to found Microsoft, become the world's fifth space tourist when he blasted into orbit aboard the Russian spaceship Soyuz TMA-10 along with two Russian cosmonauts.
2008 - The jury ruled that Princess Diana and her lover Dodi al-Fayed were unlawfully killed by the grossly negligent driving of chauffeur Henri Paul and paparazzi photographers pursuing their limousine into a Paris road tunnel in 1997.
2009 - Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was convicted of human rights crimes and sentenced to 25 years in prison, the first time a democratically elected Latin American president has been found guilty in his own country of such offences.
REUTERS
