TODAY IN HISTORY
1765: Britain enacted the Quartering Act, requiring American colonists to provide temporary housing to British soldiers.
1882: German scientist Robert Koch announced in Berlin that he had discovered the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis.
1913: New York’s Palace Theatre, the legendary home of vaudeville, opened on Broadway.
1958: Elvis Presley was inducted into the U.S. Army at the draft board in Memphis, Tenn., before boarding a bus for Fort Chaffee, Ark. (Presley underwent basic training at Fort Hood, Texas, before being shipped off to Germany.)
1965: Ranger 9, a lunar probe launched three days earlier by NASA, crashed into the moon (as planned) after sending back more than 5,800 video images.
1989: The supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound and began leaking an estimated 11 million gallons of crude oil.
1999: NATO launched airstrikes against Yugoslavia, marking the first time in its 50-year existence that it had ever attacked a sovereign country. Thirty-nine people were killed when fire erupted in the Mont Blanc tunnel in France and burned for two days.
2010: Keeping a promise he’d made to anti-abortion Democratic lawmakers to assure passage of his historic health care legislation, President Barack Obama signed an executive order against using federal funds to pay for elective abortions covered by private insurance.
2015: Germanwings Flight 9525, an Airbus A320, crashed into the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board; investigators said the jetliner was deliberately downed by the 27-year-old co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz.
2020: The International Olympic Committee announced that the Summer Olympics in Tokyo would be postponed until 2021. President Donald Trump said he hoped the United States would be reopened by Easter, even as some public health officials called for tougher, not looser, restrictions. Amid hopes of a deal on a relief package for businesses and ordinary Americans, stocks soared, with the Dow industrials surging more than 2,100 points, or 11.4 percent, for their best day since 1933.