HISTORY AT A GLANCE

TODAY is Thursday, March 23, the 82nd day of 2017. There are 283 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date: 1956 – Pakistan becomes the first Islamic republic in the

world. (Republic Day in Pakistan) 1965 – NASA launches Gemini 3, the United States’ first two-man space flight (crew: Gus Grissom and John Young). 1977 – The first of The Nixon Interviews (12 will be recorded over four weeks) are videotaped with British journalist David Frost interviewing former United States President Richard Nixon about the Watergate scandal and the Nixon tapes. 1978 – The first UNIFIL troops arrived in Lebanon for

peacekeeping mission along the Blue Line. 1980 – Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador gives his famous speech appealing to men of the El Salvadoran armed forces to stop killing the Salvadorans. 1982 – Guatemala’s government, headed by Fernando Romeo Lucas García is overthrown in a military coup by rightwing General Efraín Ríos Montt. 1983 – Strategic Defense Initiative: President Ronald Reagan makes his initial proposal to develop technology to intercept enemy missiles. 1991 – The Revolutionary United Front, with support from the special forces of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia, invades Sierra Leone in an attempt to overthrow Joseph Saidu Momoh, sparking a gruesome 11-year Sierra Leone Civil War. 1994 – At an election rally in Tijuana, Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio is assassinated by Mario Aburto Martínez. 1994 – Aeroflot Flight 593 crashes in Siberia when the pilot’s fifteen-year-old son accidentally disengages the autopilot, killing all 75 people on board. 1994 – A United States Air Force (USAF) F-16 aircraft collides with a USAF C-130 at Pope Air Force Base and then crashes, killing 24 United States Army soldiers on the ground. This later became known as the Green Ramp disaster. 1996 – Taiwan holds its first direct elections and chooses Lee

Teng-hui as President. 2001 – The Russian Mir space station is disposed of, breaking up in the atmosphere before falling into the southern Pacific Ocean near Fiji. 2003 – Battle of Nasiriyah, first major conflict during the

invasion of Iraq.