TODAY IN HISTORY

1832: A mob in Hiram, Ohio, attacked, tarred and feathered Mormon leaders Joseph Smith Jr. and Sidney Rigdon.

1882: German scientist Robert Koch announced in Berlin that he had discovered the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis.

1934: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a bill granting future independence to the Philippines.

1976: The president of Argentina, Isabel Peron, was deposed by her country’s military.

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.

1995: After 20 years, British soldiers stopped routine patrols in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

1999: NATO launched airstrikes against Yugoslavia, marking the first time in its 50-year existence that it had ever attacked a sovereign country.

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.

2013: Hundreds of thousands marched in Paris protesting the imminent legalization of same-sex marriage. (It would be signed into law just over two months later).

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.

2016: A U.N. war crimes court convicted former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic of genocide and nine other charges for orchestrating a campaign of terror that left 100,000 people dead during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia; Karadzic was sentenced to 40 years in prison. (The sentence was later increased to life in prison.)

2018: In the streets of the nation’s capital and in cities across the country, hundreds of thousands of teenagers and their supporters rallied against gun violence, spurred by a call to action from student survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that left 17 people dead.

2020: The International Olympic Committee announced that the Summer Olympics in Tokyo would be postponed until 2021 because of the coronavirus.