HIGHLIGHTS IN HISTORY

Today is Saturday, March 28, the 88th day of 2020. There are 278 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlights in History:

1898: The US Supreme Court, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, ruled 6-2 that Wong, who was born in the United States to Chinese immigrants, was an American citizen.

1930: The names of the Turkish cities of Constantinople and Angora were changed to Istanbul and Ankara.

1941: Novelist and critic Virginia Woolf, 59, drowned herself near her home in Lewes, East Sussex, England.

1942: During World War II, British naval forces staged a successful raid on the Nazioccupied French port of St Nazaire in Operation Chariot, destroying the only dry dock on the Atlantic coast capable of repairing the German battleship Tirpitz.

1969: The 34th president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, died in Washington, DC, at age 78. 1979: America’s worst commercial nuclear accident occurred with a partial meltdown inside the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania.

1987: Maria von Trapp, whose life story inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music, died in Morrisville, Vermont, at age 82.

1990: President George H.W. Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medal to the widow of US Olympic legend Jesse Owens.

1999: NATO broadened its attacks on Yugoslavia to target Serb military forces in Kosovo in the fifth straight night of airstrikes; thousands of refugees flooded into Albania and Macedonia from Kosovo.

2000: In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court, in Florida v. J.L., sharply curtailed police power in relying on anonymous tips to stop and search people.

2003: American-led forces in Iraq dropped thousand-pound bombs on Republican

Guard units guarding the gates to Baghdad and battled for control of the strategic city of Nasiriyah. President George W. Bush warned of “further sacrifice” ahead in the face of unexpectedly fierce fighting.

Ten years ago: President Barack Obama secretly visited Afghanistan near the front lines of the increasingly bloody 8-year-old war.

Five years ago: A Two Russians and an American floated into the International Space Station, eight hours after launching from Russia’s space facility in Kazakhstan; Mikhail Kornienko and Scott Kelly spent 342 days aboard the orbiting laboratory, while Russia’s Gennady Padalka stayed for six months.

One year ago: As President Donald Trump claimed that he’d been fully exonerated in the report from special counsel Robert Mueller, based on a four-page summary by his attorney general, Democrats intensified their demands for the full report; it would be released weeks later.