HISTORY AT A GLANCE

TODAY is Tuesday, March 21, the 80th day of 2017. There are 285 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date: 1935 – Shah of Iran Reza Shah Pahlavi formally asks the international community to call Persia by its native name, Iran. 1945 – World War II: British troops liberate Mandalay, Burma. 1945 – World War II: Operation Carthage: Royal Air Force planes bomb Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark. They also hit a school and 125 civilians are killed. 1960 – Apartheid: Sharpeville massacre, South Africa: Police open fire on a group of unarmed black South African demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding 180. 1963 – Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, on an island in San

Francisco Bay, closes. 1965 – Ranger program: NASA launches Ranger 9, the last in

a series of unmanned lunar space probes. 1965 – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. leads 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. 1968 – Battle of Karameh in Jordan between the Israel Defense Forces and the combined forces of the Jordanian Armed Forces and PLO. 1970 – The first Earth Day proclamation is issued by Mayor of

San Francisco Joseph Alioto. 1980 – US President Jimmy Carter announces a United States boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet war in Afghanistan. 1980 – Dallas airs its “A House Divided” episode, which leads to eight months of international speculation regarding Who shot J.R.? 1983 – The first cases of the 1983 West Bank fainting epidemic begin; Israelis and Palestinians accuse each other of poison gas, but the cause is later determined mostly to be psychosomatic. 1986 – Debi Thomas became the first African American to win

the World Figure Skating Championships 1989 – Sports Illustrated reports allegations tying baseball

player Pete Rose to baseball gambling. 1990 – Namibia becomes independent after 75 years of South

African rule. 1999 – Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones become the first to

circumnavigate the Earth in a hot air balloon. 2000 – Pope John Paul II makes his first ever pontifical visit

to Israel. 2006 – The social media site Twitter is founded. 2009 – Four police officers are shot and killed and a fifth is

wounded in two shootings at Oakland, California.