This Day in History — March 15
Today is the 75th day of 2017. There are 290 days left in the year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
1910: Magician Harry Houdini becomes the first man to fly an airplane in Australia. He also drove a car for the first time on that trip. After that, he never did either again.
OTHER EVENTS
1534: England severs all relations with Roman Catholic Papacy.
1792: Sweden’s King Gustavus II is shot and killed during a masquerade party at the Royal Opera of Stockholm.
1802: Congress authorises the establishment of the US Military Academy at West Point, New York.
1812: Austria, in alliance with France, agrees to provide army for Napoleon Bonaparte.
1844: Greece adopts Constitution with two chambers.
1850: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter is published in the United States.
1851: Spanish Concordat with Papacy goes into effect, whereby Catholicism becomes sole faith in Spain and Church gains control of education and the press.
1906: Japan nationalises its railways.
1917: Russia’s Czar Nicholas II abdicates and Prince George Lvov, Paul Milivkov and Alexander Kerensky form ministry.
1926: The first liquid-fuel rocket is successfully launched by Professor Robert Goddard at Auburn, Massachusetts. The rocket travels 56 metres (184 feet) in 2.5 seconds.
1934: Rome protocols signed between Italy, Austria and Hungary to form Danubian bloc against Little Entente of Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia.
1935: Germany repudiates disarmament clauses of Versailles Treaty that ended World War I.
1945: Japanese resistance to US assault on Iwo Jima in Pacific comes to end in World War II.
1968: During the Vietnam War, the My Lai massacre is carried out by US troops under the command of Lieutenant William L Calley Jr.
1978: Italian politician Aldo Moro is kidnapped by left-wing urban guerrillas, who later murder him.
1985: American journalist Terry Anderson of The Associated Press is captured by Muslim extremists in Beirut. He is released almost seven years later.
1993: Bomb in Calcutta, India, kills 69.
1994: Russia agrees to phase out production of weapons-grade plutonium.
1995: In a first for Russian-American cooperation in space, a Soyuz space capsule carrying an American astronaut docks with the orbiting Russian space station Mir.
1998: Rwanda, with 125,000 suspects for 500,000 murders, begins mass trials for the country’s 1994 genocide.
1999: The entire European Commission, the top executive body of the European Union, resigns after allegations of corruption and inefficiency.
2003: Anti-war protesters demonstrate across the United States to show their support for peace, including an estimated 10,000 protesters in Chicago.
2005: Syrian military intelligence agents leave Beirut, ending an 18-year presence in Lebanon.
2009: Iran’s most prominent reformer former President Mohammed Khatami pulls out of the race against the country’s hardline president, saying he does not want to split the pro-reform vote.
2012: Apple’s latest iPad draws the customary lines of diehard fans looking to be first and entrepreneurs looking to make a quick profit. The new, third model comes with a faster processor, a much sharper screen and an improved camera.
2013: One of the highest-ranking military officers yet to abandon Syrian President Bashar Assad defects to neighbouring Jordan and says that morale among those still inside the regime has collapsed.
2014: Just two weeks after Russian troops seized their peninsula, Crimeans vote to leave Ukraine and join Russia.
2015: A Roman Catholic archbishop in Australia is charged with covering up a paedophile priest during the 1970s.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
(1751-1836); Georg Simon Ohm, German physicist (1787-1854); Modest Mussorgsky, Russian(1839-1881); Reza Shah Pahlavi, shah of Iran (1878-1946); Jerry Lewis, US comedian (1926- ); Bernardo Bertolucci, Italian film director (1941- ); Kate Nelligan, Canadian-born actress (1951- )— AP
James Madison, US president
composer