Also on this date

In 1871,

journalist Henry M. Stanley began his famous expedition in Africa to locate the missing Scottish missionary David Livingstone.

In 1918,

during World War I, Germany launched its Spring Offensive on the Western Front, hoping to break through the Allied lines before American reinforcements could arrive. (Although initially successful, the offensive failed.)

In 1945,

during World War II, Allied bombers began four days of raids over Germany.

In 1963,

the Alcatraz federal prison island in San Francisco Bay was emptied of its last inmates and closed at the order of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

In 1976,

champion skier Vladimir “Spider” Sabich was shot and killed by his girlfriend, actress-singer Claudine Longet, in the home they had shared in Aspen, Colorado; Longet, who maintained the shooting was an accident, served 30 days in jail for negligent homicide.

In 1981,

Michael Donald, a black teenager in Mobile, Alabama, was abducted, tortured and killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. (A lawsuit brought by Donald’s mother later resulted in a judgment that bankrupted one Klan organization.)

In 1997,

President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin wrapped up their summit in Helsinki, Finland, agreeing on slashing nuclear weapons arsenals.

Ten years ago:

Frustrated with the pace of action to overhaul the country’s immigration system, thousands of immigrant rights supporters descended on the nation’s capital.

Five years ago:

President Barack Obama, in an interview with The Huffington Post, said he took Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “at his word” for saying an independent Palestinian state would never co-exist with Israel as long as he was in office.

One year ago:

Facebook acknowledged that it had left hundreds of millions of user passwords readable by its employees for years, storing them in readable plain text.