HISTORY AT A GLANCE

TODAY is Monday, March 13, the 72nd day of 2017. There are 293 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:

1954 – First Indochina War: Viet Minh forces under Võ Nguyên Giáp unleashed a massive artillery barrage on the French to begin the Battle of Ðien Biên Phu, the climactic battle in the First Indochina War.

1957 – Cuban student revolutionaries storm the presidential palace in Havana in a failed attempt on the life of President Fulgencio Batista.

1969 – Apollo program: Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth after testing the Lunar Module.

1979 – The New Jewel Movement, headed by Maurice Bishop, ousts Prime Minister Eric Gairy in a nearly bloodless coup d’état in Grenada.

1985 – The Kenilworth Road riot takes place at an association football match at Kenilworth Road in Luton, England with disturbances before, during and after an F.A. Cup 6th Round tie between Luton Town F.C. and Millwall F.C..

1988 – The Seikan Tunnel, the longest undersea tunnel in the

world, opens between Aomori and Hakodate, Japan.

1991 – The United States Department of Justice announces that Exxon has agreed to pay $1 billion for the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

1992 – The Mw 6.7 Erzincan earthquake strikes eastern Turkey with a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe).

At least 498 were killed in this strike-slip event on the North Anatolian Fault.

1996 – Dunblane school massacre: in Dunblane, Scotland, 16 primary school children and one teacher are shot dead by spree killer Thomas Watt Hamilton who then commits suicide.

1997 – India’s Missionaries of Charity chooses Sister Nirmala to succeed Mother Teresa as its leader.

1997 – The Phoenix Lights are seen over Phoenix, Arizona by hundreds of people, and by millions on television.

2003 – Human evolution: The journal Nature reports that 350,000-year-old footprints of an upright-walking human had been found in Italy.

2008 – Gold prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit $1,000 per ounce for the first time.

2012 – At least 28 people are killed in a bus crash in a motorway tunnel near the town of Sierre in the Swiss canton of Valais.

2013 – Pope Francis is elected, in the papal conclave, as the

266th Pope of the Catholic Church.