TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Saturday, March 28.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
On March 28, 2003, American-led forces in Iraq dropped thousand-pound bombs on Republican Guard units guarding the gates to Baghdad and battled for control of the strategic city of Nasiriyah. President George W. Bush warned of “further sacrifice” ahead in the face of unexpectedly fierce fighting.
ON THIS DATE
In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, ruled 6-2 that Wong, who was born in the United States to Chinese immigrants, was an American citizen.
In 1930, the names of the Turkish cities of Constantinople and Angora were changed to Istanbul and Ankara.
In 1941, novelist and critic Virginia Woolf, 59, drowned herself near her home in Lewes, East Sussex, England. In 1942, during World War II, British naval forces staged a successful raid on the Nazioccupied French port of St. Nazaire in Operation Chariot, destroying the only dry dock on the Atlantic coast capable of repairing the German battleship Tirpitz.
In 1963, the Alfred Hitchcock film “The Birds” premiered in New York.
In 1969, the 34th president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, died in Washington, D.C., at age 78. In 1978, in Stump v. Sparkman, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld, 5-3, the judicial immunity of an Indiana judge against a lawsuit brought by a young woman who’d been ordered sterilized by the judge when she was a teenager.
In 1979, America’s worst commercial nuclear accident occurred with a partial meltdown inside the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania.
In 1987, Maria von Trapp, whose life story inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music,” died in Morrisville, Vermont, at age 82.
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medal to the widow of U.S. Olympic legend Jesse Owens.
In 1999, NATO broadened its attacks on Yugoslavia to target Serb military forces in Kosovo in the fifth straight night of airstrikes; thousands of refugees flooded into Albania and Macedonia from Kosovo.
In 2000, in a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court, in Florida v. J.L., sharply curtailed police power in relying on anonymous tips to stop and search people.
Ten years ago: President Barack Obama secretly visited Afghanistan near the front lines of the increasingly bloody 8-year-old war.
Five years ago: Afghanistan’s highest court ruled that the police officer convicted of murdering Associated Press photographer Anja Niedringhaus and wounding AP correspondent Kathy Gannon should serve 20 years in prison.
One year ago: As President Donald Trump claimed that he’d been fully exonerated in the report from special counsel Robert Mueller, based on a four-page summary by his attorney general, Democrats intensified their demands for the full report; it would be released weeks later. The Energy Department said the Trump administration had approved seven applications for U.S. companies to sell nuclear power technology and assistance to Saudi Arabia.
THOUGHT FOR TODAY
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” — Virginia Woolf (1882-1941).
— ASSOCIATED PRESS