Today is Tuesday, March 15, the 75th day of 2016. There are 291 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
44 B.C. – Roman dictator Julius Caesar is assassinated by a group of Roman senators including Cassius and his friend Brutus. Caesar had been forewarned of the ‘Ides of March.’
1493 – Christopher Columbus returns to Spain, concluding his first voyage to the Western Hemisphere.
1603 – Samuel de Champlain, French navigator and explorer, sails for the New World.
1776 – U.S. Congress resolves that authority of British Crown should be suppressed.
1848 – Hungarian intellectuals stage bloodless revolution in Budapest against Austro-Hungarian empire. It is put down by Russian troops the next year.
1874 – France assumes protectorate over central Indochina region of Annam, which breaks off vassalage to China.
1875 – The Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York City, John McCloskey, is named the first American cardinal by Pope Pius IX.
1894 – France and Germany agree on boundaries between French Congo and Cameroon.
1903 – British conquest of northern Nigeria is complete.
1913 – U.S. President Woodrow Wilson holds the first open presidential news conference.
1916 – U.S. force of 12,000 soldiers under Gen. John Pershing is ordered to Mexico to capture revolutionary leader Pancho Villa.
1917 – Czar Nicholas II of Russia abdicates after humiliating defeat by the Germans. The Russian state and military begin to dissolve.
1919 – The American Legion is founded in Paris.
1937 – The world’s first blood bank is established at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital by Dr. Bernard Fantus. It is a breakthrough for surgical procedures and emergency treatments.
1938 – Nazi Germany seizes Czechoslovakia with little resistance, after having annexed the Sudetenland, with its fortifications, the previous year.
1989 – Soviet Union’s President Mikhail S. Gorbachev calls for rapid measures to ease chronic food shortages.
1991 – Serbian President Borisav Jovic resigns after the collective presidency fails to declare a nationwide state of emergency.
1992 – A second earthquake in a short time strikes eastern Turkey, killing an estimated 800 people.
1993 – Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin offers, after a meeting with U.S. President Bill Clinton, to surrender part of the Golan Heights to Syria.
1999 – Rosemary Nelson, a Northern Ireland attorney who represented Catholic clients in several high-profile cases, is killed by a car bomb. The outlawed anti-Catholic group Red Hand Defenders claims responsibility.
2003 – Rebels led by ousted army chief General Francois Bozize capture the Central African Republic’s capital, Bangui, and the international airport while President Ange-Felix Patasse was out of the country. Bozize declared himself president.
2005 – A French court convicts six men in an alleged plot to send a suicide bomber into the U.S. Embassy in Paris, wrapping up a trial that shed light on the spread of Islamic radicals in Europe.
2006 – A Spanish boat recovers the bodies of 24 people believed to be African migrants floating in waters off the coast of Mauritania, hundreds of miles (kilometers) south of the Canary Islands.
2012 – Dozens of Iranian banks are blocked from doing business with much of the world as the West tightens the financial screws on a country it wants to prevent from developing nuclear weapons.
2014 – Malaysia’s leader says the jetliner from his country missing for more than a week was deliberately diverted and continued flying for more than six hours after severing contact with the ground.
2015 – Philippine troops capture the leader of a Muslim rebel group in the south who had been linked to bombings and a beheading and accused of protecting two terror suspects wanted by the United States.
Today’s Birthdays:
Andrew Jackson, U.S. president (1767-1845); Charles de Montalembert, French author (1810-1870); Jules Chevalier, French priest/founder of Sacred Heart Missionaries (1824-1907); Henri Saint Cyr, Swedish equestrian/Olympic gold medalist (1902-1979); Harry James, U.S. bandleader (1916-1983); Judd Hirsch, U.S actor (1935–); Sly Stone, U.S. singer/musician (1943–); will.i.am, U.S. rapper/musician (1975–); Eva Longoria Parker, U.S. actress (1975–).
Thought For Today:
Sometimes it’s worse to win a fight than to lose — Billie Holiday, American singer (1915-1959).
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