Today is Wednesday, April 30, the 120th day of 2025. There are 245 days left in the year.
Today in history:
On April 30, 1789, George Washington took the oath of office at Federal Hall in New York as the first president of the United States.
Also on this date:
In 1803, the United States completed its purchase of the 828,000 square mile Louisiana Territory from France for 60 million francs, the equivalent of about $15 million; the acquisition roughly doubled the size of the United States.
In 1900, engineer John Luther “Casey” Jones of the Illinois Central Railroad died in a train wreck near Vaughan, Mississippi, staying at the controls to slow his passenger train before it struck a stalled train near an approaching station; Jones was the only fatality of the accident.
In 1945, as Soviet troops approached his Berlin bunker, Adolf Hitler took his own life, as did Eva Braun, whom Hitler married the previous day.
In 1973, as the Watergate scandal deepened, President Richard Nixon announced the resignations of top aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst and White House counsel John Dean (though Dean was actually fired by Nixon).
In 1975, the Vietnam War ended as the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to Communist forces.
In 1993, top-ranked women’s tennis player Monica Seles was stabbed in the back during a match in Hamburg, Germany, by a man who described himself as a fan of second-ranked German player Steffi Graf. (The man was convicted of causing grievous bodily injury, but was given only a two-year suspended sentence.)
In 1993, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced that the World Wide Web, which was invented at CERN four years earlier by Tim Berners-Lee, was free for anyone to use, and released its source code to the public domain.
Today’s Birthdays: UN Secretary-General António Guterres is 76. Filmmaker Jane Campion is 71. Filmmaker Lars von Trier is 69. Basketball Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas is 64. Actor Johnny Galecki is 50. Actor Sam Heughan is 45. Actor Kunal Nayyar is 44. Rapper Lloyd Banks is 43. Actor Kirsten Dunst is 43. Basketball Hall of Famer Seimone Augustus is 41. Actor Gal Gadot is 40. Actor Dianna Agron is 39. Actor Ana de Armas is 37. Rapper-producer Travis Scott is 34.
