Today is Monday, March 7, the 67th day of 2016. There are 299 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1573 – Peace of Constantinople ends war between Turkey and Venice.
1793 – France declares war on Spain, and Spanish forces invade Roussillon and Navarre.
1820 – Spain’s King Ferdinand II is forced to restore the Constitution of 1812 and end the Inquisition.
1821 – Neopolitan rebels are crushed by Austrians at Rieti.
1854 – A sewing machine that could stitch buttonholes is patented by Charles Miller of St. Louis.
1926 – The first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversation takes place, between New York City and London.
1935 – Restoration of Saar to Germany marks beginning of German expansion.
1936 – Germany violates Treaty of Versailles by occupying demilitarized zone in the Rhineland.
1939 – Civil war breaks out in Madrid between communist and anti-communist factions while Nationalist forces lay siege to the city.
1941 – British troops invade Italian-occupied Abyssinia — now Ethiopia — in World War II.
1951 – Iran’s Prime Minister Ali Razmara is assassinated.
1965 – A march by U.S. civil rights demonstrators is broken up in Selma, Alabama, by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse.
1977 – Saudi Arabia announces it will give one billion dollars in aid to Africa.
1988 – British soldiers and police fatally shoot three Irish Republican Army guerrillas after they plant a car bomb set to go off during military parade in British colony of Gibraltar.
1989 – China declares martial law in Tibetan capital of Lhasa following three days of anti-Chinese rioting.
1991 – Forces loyal to President Saddam Hussein reportedly execute as many as 400 people in southern Iraq following days of rebellion in Basra and other cities.
1994 – Multinational African army installs new government in Liberia.
1996 – Three U.S. servicemen are convicted in the rape of a 12-year-old Japanese girl and sentenced to between 6 1/2 and 7 years in prison.
2001 – Ariel Sharon takes over as Israel’s prime minister.
2002 – Hindu-Muslim rioting in the western Indian state of Gujarat leaves more than 600 people dead. Hindu mobs massacre Muslims after a train carrying Hindu activists was torched by Muslims in the city of Godhra the previous week.
2005 – A fire set by rioting gang members kills 134 inmates of a provincial jail in the Dominican Republic, where overcrowded cells are overrun with rats, cockroaches and bedbugs.
2006 – A series of coordinated bombings rock a packed railway station and crowded temple in Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city, killing 20 people and injuring dozens in an attack that raised fears of communal violence.
2007 – A Garuda Airlines Boeing 737-400 burst into flames after careening off a runway in Indonesia’s Yogyakarta on Java island, killing at least 21 people. Investigators said the jetliner’s front wheels had snapped off as it touched down.
2008 – The Russian-backed region of Abkhazia appeals to the world community to recognize it as independent from Georgia, citing Kosovo as a precedent.
2013 – The U.N. Security Council votes unanimously for tough new sanctions to punish North Korea for its latest nuclear test, and a furious Pyongyang threatens a nuclear strike against the U.S.
2014 — Hard-line militants turn Syria’s devastated eastern city of Raqqa into the nucleus of their vision for the Islamic caliphate they hope to establish in Syria and Iraq.
2015 — Colombia’s government and the country’s biggest rebel movement announce an agreement to begin a pilot program for removing land mines as part of efforts to lower the intensity of a conflict that has lasted a half century.
Today’s Birthdays:
Allessandro Manzoni, Italian author (1785-1873); Sir John Herschel, English astronomer (1792-1871); Thomas Masaryk, Czech statesman (1850-1937); Maurice Ravel, French composer (1875-1937); Anna Magnani, Italian actress (1908-1973); Willard Scott, U.S. weatherman for the “Today” show, (1934–); Michael Eisner, U.S. chairman, Walt Disney Co. (1942–); Rachel Weisz, British actress (1971–).
Thought For Today:
If you’re not feeling good about you, what you’re wearing outside doesn’t mean a thing — Leontyne Price, American opera singer (1927-).
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