Today is Monday March 14, the 74th day of 2016. There are 292 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1558 – Ferdinand I assumes title of Holy Roman Emperor without being crowned by the Pope.
1689 – Convention Parliament meets in Scotland, and William and Mary are proclaimed King and Queen of England.
1757 – British Admiral John Byng is executed for neglect of duty resulting in loss of Menorca.
1794 – American Eli Whitney receives a patent for the cotton gin.
1840 – Constitution in Rome is promulgated by Pope Pius IX.
1844 – Carlos Antonio Lopez sworn in as first constitutional president of Paraguay.
1900 – U.S. Congress ratifies the Gold Standard Act.
1917 – China severs diplomatic relations with Germany in World War I.
1923 – U.S. President Warren Harding becomes the first chief executive to file an income tax report.
1939 – The Republic of Czechoslovakia is dissolved, opening the way for Nazi occupation.
1951 – United Nations forces recapture Seoul during the Korean War.
1964 – A jury in Dallas finds Jack Ruby guilty of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, in November 1963.
1965 – Israel’s cabinet formally approves establishment of diplomatic relations with West Germany.
1973 – United States relaxes embargo on arms shipments to Pakistan and India.
1976 – Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat asks Parliament to cancel treaty with Soviet Union, charging that Moscow failed to provide arms that had been promised.
1988 – Iran and Iraq unleash missiles on each other’s capitals as so-called “war of the cities” erupts.
1992 – The warring parties in Croatia pledge to cooperate to end the civil war ahead of the deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping force.
1998 – India’s Congress party appoints as its president Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of assassinated prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
1999 – Afghanistan’s Taliban Islamic group and opposition factions agree in principle to create a coalition government and end decades of fighting.
2002 – Serbia and Montenegro, the two republics that comprise the Yugoslav federation, sign an accord to restructure their ties and formally drop the name Yugoslavia.
2007 – A team from the International Atomic Energy Agency visits North Korea for the first time since the country kicked inspectors out in 2002, a significant first step toward renewed relations. IAEA officials say North Korea is committed to nuclear disarmament.
2011 – The U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv says it is “deeply concerned” by Israel’s plans to build hundreds of new homes in the West Bank following a deadly attack on a settler family, calling Israeli settlements “illegitimate” and an obstacle to peacemaking.
2012 – President Barack Obama and British Prime Minster David Cameron say for the first time that NATO forces will hand over the lead combat role to Afghanistan forces next year as the U.S. and its allies aim to get out by the end of 2014.
2013 – Pope Francis puts his humility on display during his first day as pontiff, stopping by his hotel to pick up his luggage and pay the bill himself in a decidedly different style of papacy than his tradition-minded predecessor who kept to the Vatican.
2014 — A Paris court delivers France’s first-ever conviction for genocide, sentencing a Rwandan former intelligence chief to 25 years in prison over the 1994 killings of at least 500,000 people in the African country.
2015 — U.S. officials say the Obama administration is abandoning plans to cut the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to 5,500 by the end of the year, bowing to military leaders who want to keep more troops, includijng many into the 2016 fighting season.
Today’s Birthdays:
Casey Jones, U.S. railroad engineer (1864-1900); Maxim Gorky, Russian novelist (1868-1936); Albert Einstein, German-born physicist (1879-1955); Michael Caine, English actor (1933–); Quincy Jones, U.S. music producer (1933–); Wolfgang Petersen, U.S. director (1941–); Billy Crystal, U.S. actor/comedian (1948–).
Thought For Today:
The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic dignity — Steve Biko, South African anti-apartheid activist (1946-1977)
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
