Today is Friday, March 25, the 85th day of 2016. There are 281 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1634 – British colonists under Lord Baltimore reach Maryland in North America.
1815 – Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia form new alliance against Napoleon Bonaparte after he escapes from confinement on Elba.
1821 – Greek patriots begin revolt against domination of Ottoman Empire, an uprising that lasts 12 years and wins Greek independence.
1911 – A fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. factory in New York City kills 146 immigrant workers; the tragedy galvanizes America’s labor movement.
1913 – The home of vaudeville, the Palace Theater, opens in New York City
1941 – Yugoslavia joins Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Alliance in World War II.
1965 – Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. leads 25,000 marchers to the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks.
1968 – Ethnic Chinese opposition politicians and university teachers form the Malaysian opposition party Gerakan Ra’ayat Malaysia.
1969 – Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan turns power over to the military after 11 years of leadership.
1971 – Pakistani troops are deployed in East Pakistan — now Bangladesh — to quell rebels demanding an independent state.
1975 – Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal is assassinated in Riyadh by nephew with history of mental illness. Faisal’s brother, Crown Prince Khaled, succeeds to throne.
1982 – The Canada Act is signed; ratifying the Canadian constitution and making the country wholly independent of Great Britain.
1990 – Arson fire in illegal nightclub kills 87 in the Bronx, New York; most of them Honduran and Dominican immigrants.
1991 – United States says Saddam Hussein has almost succeeded in putting down a rebellion by Shiites in southern Iraq with the help of aircraft flown in violation of the Gulf War cease-fire accord.
1992 – Returning from a 10-month stay in space, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev is given smelling salts when he learns that the Soviet Union has disintegrated while he was away.
1993 – Gunmen storm the military compound of President Gnassingbe Eyadema in Lome, Togo, and kill his top military aide, then flee from government troops.
1996 – The European Union moves to ban British beef, five days after the British government alerts the public to the danger of eating meat from cows with mad cow disease.
1998 – U.S. President Bill Clinton, on a visit to Rwanda, acknowledges that the United States and the world failed to protect Rwandans from the 1994 campaign of genocide that killed half a million people, mostly Tutsis.
2002 – An earthquake and several aftershocks in northern Afghanistan kill as many as 2,000 people and injure more than 4,000, according to officials in Kabul, the capital.
2005 – The U.S. agrees to sell about two dozen sophisticated F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan, a diplomatically sensitive move that rewards Pakistan for its help in fighting terrorism, but angers India.
2010 – Eurozone countries agree on a financial backstop for Greece that would combine loans from other eurozone governments and the International Monetary Fund, a move aimed at stopping the government debt crisis that has undermined the shared currency.
2012 – The U.S. pays $50,000 in compensation for each villager killed and $11,000 for each person wounded in a shooting rampage allegedly carried out by a rogue American soldier in southern Afghanistan.
2014 —U.S. President Barack Obama declares that a security summit took “concrete steps” to prevent nuclear material from falling into the hands of terrorists even though Russia and China failed to sign an agreement to beef up inspections.
2015 — At Iraq’s request, the U.S. begins airstrikes in Tikrit in support of a stalled Iraqi ground offensive to retake the city from Islamic State fighters.
Today’s Birthdays:
Joachim Murat, French soldier and King of Naples (1767-1815); Anne Bronte, English novelist (1820-1849); Arturo Toscanini, Italian-born conductor (1867-1957); Bela Bartok, Hungarian composer (1881-1945); David Lean, British film director (1908-1991); Gloria Steinem, U.S. feminist-editor (1934–); Elton John, British entertainer-songwriter (1947–); Sarah Jessica Parker, U.S. actress (1965–); Aretha Franklin, R-and-B singer (1942–).
Thought For Today:
We do not do what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are — that is the fact — Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher (1905-1980).
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