Today is Thursday, March 3, the 63rd day of 2016. There are 303 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1707 – Mogul Emperor Aurangjeb dies in India and is succeeded by Bahadur.
1813 – Britain signs Treaty of Stockholm with Sweden, which agrees to supply army in return for British subsidies and a promise not to oppose union with Norway.
1849 – U.S. Congress creates the Minnesota Territory; the Home Department, forerunner of the U.S. Interior Department, is established.
1861 – Emancipation of Russian serfs is proclaimed.
1875 – The Georges Bizet opera “Carmen” premieres in Paris.
1878 – Bulgaria is liberated from five centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule.
1896 – Peace of Bucharest between Serbia and Bulgaria is signed.
1918 – Russian Bolsheviks sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ceding territory with a quarter of its population to Germany and ending Russia’s participation in World War I.
1931 – The United States officially adopts the Star-Spangled Banner” as the country’s national anthem.
1932 – Chinese forces are driven back from Shanghai by Japanese.
1941 – Bulgaria signs the Tripartite Pact and allows German troops to cross its territory. Although Bulgaria becomes an ally of Nazi Germany, Bulgarians oppose deportation of Jews and save them from Nazi death camps.
1974 – Turkish Airlines DC-10 crashes shortly after takeoff from Orly Airport in Paris, killing nearly 350 people.
1976 – U.S. government under President Gerald Ford discloses that it has decided to sell weapons to Egypt.
1986 – Protestant militants go on car-burning rampage in central Belfast, Northern Ireland, to protest the Anglo-Irish accord.
1991 – In a case that sparked a national outcry, black motorist Rodney King is severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers in a scene captured on amateur video.
1992 – Police say they have recovered the bodies of 120 Azerbaijanis killed as they fled an Armenian assault in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan.
1996 – A bomb explodes aboard a bus in the heart of Jerusalem, killing 19 people, including the bomber.
1997 – A passenger train derails in Pakistan’s Punjab province, killing at least 125 people and injuring more than 450.
1999 – An estimated 74 million U.S. viewers watch former White House intern Monica Lewinsky confess the details of her affair with U.S. President Bill Clinton.
2000 – Former dictator General Augusto Pinochet returns to Chile a free man, 16 months after he was detained in Britain on torture charges.
2003 – U.S. officials announce the arrests of three members of Rwanda’s ethnic Hutu rebel movement for the 1999 murders of two American tourists in Uganda. The killers reportedly targeted English-speaking visitors to undermine U.S. and British support for the new Rwandan government.
2007 – Pakistan successfully test-fires a short-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead two weeks ahead of peace talks with archrival neighboring India.
2009 – The Vatican seeks to show that it is not opposed to science and evolutionary theory, hosting a conference on Charles Darwin and trying to debunk the idea it embraces creationism or intelligent design.
2011 -Egypt’s military rulers appoint the first post-Hosni Mubarak prime minister, replacing an air force pilot close to the ousted leader in a bid to appease thousands of protesters who had threatened to renew the occupation of a central Cairo square.
2013 – A car bomb explodes outside a mosque, killing 37 people and wounding another 141 in a Shiite Muslim neighborhood in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, the third mass casualty attack on the minority sect this year.
2014 – Russia tightens its grip on Crimea, a predominantly Russian-speaking region in Ukraine, while the U.S. and European Union flounder for a solution.
2015 — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands before Congress and bluntly warns the U.S. that an emerging nuclear agreement with Iran “paves Iran’s path to the bomb.”
Today’s Birthdays:
Thomas Otway, English dramatist (1652-1685); Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish-American inventor of telephone (1847-1922); Jean Harlow, U.S. actress
(1911-1937); Jennifer Warnes, U.S. singer (1947–); Miranda Richardson, British actress (1958–); Tone-Loc, U.S. rapper/actor (1966–); Jessica Biel, U.S. actress (1982–).
Thought For Today:
America is a tune. It must be sung together — Gerald Stanley Lee, American clergyman and author (1862-1944).
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
