Today is Tuesday, March 22, the 82nd day of 2016. There are 284 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date.
1594 – Paris opens its gates to King Henry VI, newly converted to Catholicism. He is said to have uttered “Paris is well worth a Mass!”
1622 – About 35 Virginians are killed in first massacre by Native Americans of European colonists in North America.
1794 – U.S. Congress passes law prohibiting American ships from supplying slaves to other countries.
1882 – U.S. Congress outlaws polygamy.
1895 – Auguste and Louis Lumiere show their first movie to an invited audience in Paris; this is generally regarded as the first public display of a movie projected onto a screen.
1917 – United States becomes first nation to recognize new provisional government in Russia.
1945 – Arab League is founded in Cairo, Egypt.
1962 – Right-wing French terrorists attack government forces in Algiers.
1963 – United States attempts to mediate political dispute that threatens civil war in South Vietnam.
1978 – Karl Wallenda, the 73-year-old patriarch of The Flying Wallendas high-wire act, falls to his death while attempting to walk a cable strung between two buildings of a hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
1987 – Chadian soldiers seize major Libyan ground and air base at Ouadi Doum in northern Chad after heavy fighting.
1990 – A jury in Anchorage, Alaska, finds former tanker captain Joseph Hazelwood innocent of three major charges in connection with the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but convicts him of a minor charge of negligent discharge of oil.
1991 – Police fire on pro-democracy protesters in Bamako, Mali, killing 30, in violence that leads to the overthrow of dictator Gen. Moussa Traore.
1993 – Khmer Rouge guerrillas in Cambodia attack an ethnic Vietnamese fishing village, killing 35.
1994 – A Russian Airbus A-310 crashes in Siberia en route to Hong Kong after the pilot’s teenage son takes the controls. All 75 people aboard die.
1996 – U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia issues the first indictments for crimes against Serbs, charging three Bosnian Muslims and a Bosnian Croat with murder, torture and rape.
1999 – U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke meets with Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in a last-ditch attempt to gain concessions on Kosovo, while Yugoslav police and army troops burn villages in the rebel province.
2001 – The United States orders the ouster of more than 50 Russian diplomats suspected of undercover intelligence activities.
2008 – Taiwan’s opposition candidate Ma Ying-jeou crushes his rival in presidential elections, promising a China policy that would defuse decades of tension with the island’s missile-wielding neighbor.
2009 – A group of Saudi clerics urges the kingdom’s new information minister to ban women from appearing on TV or in newspapers and magazines, making clear the country’s hard-line religious establishment is skeptical of a new push toward modernization.
2011 – Yemen’s U.S.-backed president, his support crumbling among political allies and the army, warns that the country could slide into a civil war as the opposition rejects his offer to step down by the end of the year.
2013 – Israel and Turkey agree to restore full diplomatic relations after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apologizes in a phone call for a deadly naval raid against a Gaza-bound international flotilla in a dramatic turnaround partly brokered by President Barack Obama.
2014 – Pope Francis names the initial members of a commission to advise him on sex abuse policy and half of them are women, including one who was assaulted by a priest as a child.
2015 — French Prime Minister Manuel Valls hails the defeat of the far-right National Front in first-round local elections, while minimizing the third-place finish of his Socialist party.
Today’s Birthdays:
Anthony van Dyck, Dutch artist (1599-1641); Robert Andress Millikan, U.S. scientist (1868-1953); Marcel Marceau, French mime (1923-2007); Karl Malden, U.S. actor (1912-2009); Stephen Sondheim, U.S. composer (1930–); William Shatner, Canadian-born actor (1931–); Andrew Lloyd Webber, British composer (1948–); Reese Witherspoon, U.S. actress (1976–).
Thought For Today:
Although human life is priceless, we always act as if something had an even greater price than life … But what is that something? — Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French author (1900-1944)
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