This Week In History
March 17, 2015
The remains of Spanish literary giant Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, were found in a Madrid convent nearly 400 years after his death
1899: The first radio distress call, using the word Mayday, was sent from a ship off the English coast, summoning a lifeboat to assist another ship aground 1969: Golda Meir was sworn in as Israel’s first woman Prime Minister 1974: A crippling oil crisis was eased as the OPEC nations agreed to lift a five-month embargo on the West 1999: Six members of the International Olympic Committee were officially expelled for accepting bribes
March 18, 2014
Russia formally annexed Crimea after a referendum in which 97% of voters chose to secede from Ukraine. The West refused to recognise the vote 1944: The first alarm clocks went on sale in Chicago since the start of World War II 1949: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, was formed 2009: Actress Natasha Richardson died from head injuries sustained in a skiing accident in Canada 2018: Russian President Vladimir Putin won a landslide re-election victory, extending his rule for another six years
March 19, 2018
Sudan, the world’s last male northern white rhinoceros, died in Kenya. The 45-year-old rhino was euthanised after suffering from “age-related complications”
1931: The hangover cure Alka Seltzer was first marketed 1931: The US state of Nevada voted to legalise gambling to bring in much needed money during the Great Depression
1999: The UN estimated that up to 240,000 people had fled their homes in Kosovo as Serb attacks continued 2009: Austrian Josef Fritzl was jailed for life for the 24-year imprisonment and rape of his daughter
March 20, 1969
John Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar. Their sudden decision to marry came just over a week after Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman 1987: The HIV/AIDS treatment drug, AZT, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration 1995: Tokyo’s underground was paralysed when terrorists released deadly nerve gas, killing 12 people
2009: The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois discovered a new subatomic particle, Y(4140) 2016: Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Cuba since 1928
March 21, 2004
Ethiopian athlete Kenenisa Bekele became the first athlete to win the long- and short-course world cross-country titles in three consecutive years
1960: South African police opened fire on black demonstrators, killing 69 people in the Sharpeville Massacre 1994: Steven Spielberg collected his first Oscars, Best Director and Best Film, for Schindler’s List
2006: Twitter, the online service enabling users to send 140-character messages called “tweets”, was incorporated 2010: Plastiki, a boat built from 12,000 plastic bottles, set sail from San Francisco to Sydney
March 22, 2004
The UN warned of a major humanitarian crisis unfolding in Sudan, where ethnic cleansing was taking place in Darfur with the complicity of the government
1895: In Paris, Auguste and Louis Lumiere first demonstrated motion pictures using celluloid film 1919: The first international airline service, a weekly flight between Paris and Brussels, was instituted 1945: Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria founded the Arab League 1997: The Hale-Bopp comet, returning from the outer solar system, made its closest approach to Earth, about 122 million miles
March 23, 1919
Benito Mussolini founded what later became the National Fascist Party in Italy. By 1925 he had established a totalitarian state with himself as supreme leader
1993: UN scientists reported record low ozone levels over a large area of the western hemisphere 1996: Lee Teng-hui became Taiwan’s first democratically-elected President 2004: Nasa’s Mars rover Opportunity revealed that there were once shallow salty seas on the planet 2014: What became the worst ever outbreak of the Ebola virus was confirmed in West Africa