TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT:
Today is Thursday, March 25.
On March 25, 1911, 146 people, mostly young female immigrants, were killed when fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York.
ON THIS DATE:
In 1634, English colonists sent by Lord Baltimore arrived in present-day Maryland.
In 1776, Gen. George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, was awarded the first Congressional Gold Medal by the Continental Congress.
In 1915, the U.S. Navy lost its first commissioned submarine as the USS F-4 sank off Hawaii, claiming the lives of all 21 crew members. In 1931, in the so-called “Scottsboro Boys” case, nine young Black men were taken off a train in Alabama, accused of raping two white women; after years of convictions, death sentences and imprisonment, the nine were eventually vindicated. In 1947, a coal-dust explosion inside the Centralia Coal Co. Mine No. 5 in Washington County, Illinois, claimed 111 lives; 31 men survived.
In 1954, RCA announced it had begun producing color television sets at its plant in Bloomington, Indiana.
In 1963, private pilot Ralph Flores and his 21-year-old passenger, Helen Klaben, were rescued after being stranded for seven weeks in brutally cold conditions in the Yukon after their plane crashed.
In 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led 25,000 people to the Alabama state capitol in Montgomery after a five-day march from Selma to protest the denial of voting rights to Blacks. Later that day, civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit homemaker, was shot and killed by Ku Klux Klansmen.
In 1985, “Amadeus”won eight Academy Awards, including best picture, best director for Milos (MEE’lohsh) Forman and best actor for F. Murray Abraham. In 1987, the Supreme Court, in Johnson v. Transportation Agency, ruled 6-3 that an employer could promote a woman over an arguably more-qualified man to help get women into higherranking jobs.
In 1988, in New York City’s so-called “Preppie Killer” case, Robert Chambers
Jr. pleaded guilty to firstdegree manslaughter in the death of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin. (Chambers received 5 to 15 years in prison; he was released in 2003 after serving the full sentence.)
In 1990, 87 people, most of them Honduran and Dominican immigrants, were killed when fire raced through an illegal social club in New York City.
Ten years ago: Canadian opposition parties brought down the Conservative government in a noconfidence vote, triggering an election that gave Prime Minister Stephen Harper a clear Conservative majority in Parliament.
Five years ago: A suicide bomber believed to be a teenager blew himself up in a soccer stadium south of the Iraqi capital, killing 29 people and wounding 60.
The Rolling Stones unleashed two hours of thundering rock and roll on an ecstatic crowd of hundreds of thousands of Cubans and foreign visitors in Havana; the free concert came two days after President Barack Obama concluded his historic visit to Cuba.