TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Friday, March 5, the 64th day of 2021. There are 301 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History: On March 5, 1953, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin died after three decades in power.

On this date:

■ In 1927, “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place,” the last Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was published in the U.S. in Liberty Magazine.

■ In 1933, in German parliamentary elections, the Nazi Party won 44 percent of the vote; the Nazis joined with a conservative nationalist party to gain a slender majority in the Reichstag.

■ In 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in which he said: “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent, allowing police governments to rule Eastern Europe.”

■ In 1963, country music performers Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins died in the crash of their plane, a Piper Comanche, near Camden, Tennessee, along with pilot Randy Hughes (Cline’s manager).

■ In 1977, President Jimmy Carter took questions from 42 telephone callers in 26 states on a network radio call-in program moderated by Walter Cronkite.

■ In 1982, comedian John Belushi was found dead of a drug overdose in a rented bungalow in Hollywood; he was 33.

■ In 1998, NASA scientists said enough water was frozen in the loose soil of the moon to support a lunar base and perhaps, one day, a human colony.

■ In 2006, AT&T announced it was buying BellSouth Corp., a big step toward resurrecting the old Ma Bell telephone system.