Today is Saturday, March 19, the 78th day of 2016. There are 287 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1799 – Napoleon Bonaparte begins siege of Acre — now Akko, Israel — which was defended by Turks.
1812 – Spanish Cortes passes liberal constitution under a hereditary monarch.
1861 – Maori War in New Zealand ends.
1920 – The U.S. Senate rejects for the second time the United States’ involvement in the League of Nations by a vote of 49-35.
1932 – Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia officially opens.
1933 – Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini proposes a pact with Britain, France and Germany.
1944 – Nazi German soldiers occupy Hungary.
1962 – Relative calm returns to Algeria after cease-fire, ending seven years of warfare between French and Algerian nationalists.
1963 – Algeria demands that France negotiate on ending nuclear testing in Algerian Sahara.
1970 – Heads of government of West and East Germany, Willy Brandt and Willi Stoph, meet for the first time in Erfurt.
1971 – At least 160 people perish in landslides north of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
1977 – The president of the Republic of Congo, Marien Ngouabi, is assassinated at his official residence in Brazzaville.
1987 – U.S. television evangelist Jim Bakker resigns as chairman of his PTL ministry organization amid a sex-and-money scandal involving Jessica Hahn, a former church secretary.
1988 – Two British soldiers are shot to death after they were dragged from a car and beaten by mourners attending an Irish Republican Army funeral in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
1990 – Latvia’s political opposition claims victory in the republic’s first free elections in 50 years.
1994 – Cambodian government seizes control of Pailin, the Khmer Rouge’s main stronghold.
1996 – A discotheque fire kills at least 150 people in Manila, Philippines.
1998 – Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic agrees to international demands to pull back special police from the troubled province of Kosovo.
1999 – A bomb shatters a packed outdoor food market in southern Russia, killing at least 56 people.
2003 – The U.S. launches an attack against Iraq after a deadline for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to go into exile expires.
2006 – Thousands of protesters throng the main square of the Belarusian capital of Minsk, refusing to recognize a presidential vote that appears all but certain to give President Alexander Lukashenko a third term.
2008 – Belgium’s political parties announce a deal to form a new national government, ending a nine-month political stalemate that had threatened to split the country along linguistic lines.
2010 – Yemen’s president declares the country’s six-year war with northern rebels over, saying the Shiite militants are honoring a cease-fire agreement signed a month ago.
2011 – The U.S. fires more than 100 cruise missiles from the sea while French fighter jets target Moammar Gadhafi’s forces from the air, launching the broadest international military effort since the Iraq in support of an uprising against him. .
2012 – A motorbike assailant opens fire with two handguns in front of a Jewish school in the French city of Toulouse, killing a rabbi, his two young sons and a girl.
2013 – Iraqi insurgents send a bloody message on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, carrying out a wave of bombings across the country that killed at least 65 people in the deadliest day in Iraq this year.
21014 — Russian forces seize military installations across the disputed Crimean Peninsula after Russian President Vladimir Putin seized it.
2015 — Thousands of people left homeless by a fierce cyclone that struck of Vanuatu remain in shelters in the South Pacific island waiting for relief and a return to normalcy as the death toll rises to 13.
Today’s Birthdays:
David Livingstone, British explorer-missionary (1813-1873); Sergei Diaghilev, Russian choreographer (1872-1929); Max Reger, German composer (1873-1916); Paul Atkinson, U.S. guitarist/music producer (1947-2004); Ursula Andress, Swiss-born actress (1936–); Glenn Close, U.S. actress (1947–); Bruce Willis, German-born U.S. actor (1955–); Harvey Weinstein, U.S. film producer (1952–).
Thought For Today:
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere — Ali ibn-Abi-Talib, the fourth caliph (602-661).
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