TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Sunday, March 24, the 84th day of 2024. There are 282 days left in the year. On this date in:

1765: Britain enacted the Quartering Act, requiring American colonists to provide temporary housing to British soldiers.

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.

1980: One of El Salvador’s most respected Roman Catholic Church leaders, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was shot to death by a sniper as he celebrated Mass in San Salvador.

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.