HISTORY AT A GLANCE
TODAY is Saturday, March 18, the 77th day of 2017. There are 288 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date: 1959 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs a bill into law allowing for Hawaiian statehood, which would become official on August 21. 1962 – The Évian Accords end the Algerian War of
Independence, which had begun in 1954. 1965 – Cosmonaut Alexey Leonov, leaving his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes, becomes the first person to walk in space. 1968 – Gold standard: The U.S. Congress repeals the
requirement for a gold reserve to back US currency. 1969 – The United States begins secretly bombing the Sihanouk Trail in Cambodia, used by communist forces to infiltrate South Vietnam. 1970 – Lon Nol ousts Prince Norodom Sihanouk of
Cambodia. 1971 – In Peru a landslide crashes into Yanawayin Lake, killing
200 people at the mining camp of Chungar. 1974 – Oil embargo crisis: Most OPEC nations end a fivemonth oil embargo against the United States, Europe and Japan. 1980 – At Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia, 50 people are killed by an explosion of a Vostok-2M rocket on its launch pad during a fueling operation. 1990 – Germans in the German Democratic Republic vote in the first democratic elections in the former communist dictatorship. 1990 – In the largest art theft in US history, 12 paintings, collectively worth around $300 million, are stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. 1992 – In a national referendum white South Africans vote
overwhelmingly in favour of ending apartheid. 1994 – Bosnia’s Bosniaks and Croats sign the Washington Agreement, ending war between the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia and the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and establishing the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. 1996 – A nightclub fire in Quezon City, Philippines kills 162
people. 1997 – The tail of a Russian Antonov An-24 charter plane breaks off while en route to Turkey causing the plane to crash and killing all 50 people on board and leading to the grounding of all An-24s. 2015 – The Bardo National Museum in Tunisia is attacked by gunmen. 23 people, almost all tourists, are killed, and at least 50 other people are wounded.