On this day, March 18
1922 Mohandas K. Gandhi was sentenced in India to six years’ imprisonment for civil disobedience. (He was released after serving two years.)
1925 The Tri-State Tornado struck southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois and southwestern Indiana, resulting in some 700 deaths.
1937 In America’s worst school disaster, nearly 300 people, most of them children, were killed in a natural gas explosion at the New London Consolidated School in Rusk County, Texas.
1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the War Relocation Authority, which was put in charge of interning Japanese Americans, with Milton S. Eisenhower (the younger brother of Dwight D. Eisenhower) as its director.
1963 The U.S. Supreme Court, in Gideon v. Wainwright, ruled unanimously that state courts were required to provide legal counsel to criminal defendants who could not afford to hire an attorney on their own.
1974 Most of the Arab oil-producing nations ended their 5-month-old embargo against the United States that had been sparked by American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War.
2002 Brittanie Cecil died two days short of her 14th birthday after being hit in the head by a puck at a game between the host Columbus Blue Jackets and Calgary Flames; it was apparently the first such fan fatality in NHL history.
2013 A mortar shell explosion killed seven Marines from Camp Lejeune and injured eight other people during mountain warfare training at Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada.
2018 A self-driving Uber SUV struck and killed a pedestrian in suburban Phoenix in the first death involving a fully autonomous test vehicle; Uber suspended its autonomous vehicle testing program in Arizona, California, Pittsburgh and Toronto after the crash.
2020 The U.S. and Canada agreed to temporarily close their shared border to nonessential travel in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
Today’s birthdays: Composer John Kander is 96. Actor Brad Dourif is 73. Jazz musician Bill Frisell is 72. Alt-country musician Karen Grotberg (The Jayhawks) is 64. Movie writer-director Luc Besson is 64. Actor Geoffrey Owens is 62. Actor Thomas Ian Griffith is 61. Singer-songwriter James McMurtry is 61. TV personality Mike Rowe is 61. Singer-actor Vanessa L. Williams is 60. Olympic gold medal speedskater Bonnie Blair is 59. Actor David Cubitt is 58. Rock musician Jerry Cantrell (Alice in Chains) is 57. Rock singer-musician Miki Berenyi is 56. Actor Michael Bergin is 54. Rapper-actor-talk show host Queen Latifah is 53. Former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus is 51. Actor-comedian Dane Cook is 51. Country singer Philip Sweet (Little Big Town) is 49. Rock musician Stuart Zender is 49. Singers Evan and Jaron Lowenstein are 49. Actor-singer-dancer Sutton Foster is 48. Rock singer Adam Levine (Maroon 5) is 44. Rock musician Daren Taylor (Airborne Toxic Event) is 43. Olympic gold medal figure skater Alexei Yagudin is 43. Actor Adam Pally is 41. Actor Cornelius Smith Jr. is 41. Actor Duane Henry (TV: “NCIS”) is 38. Actor Lily Collins is 34. Actor-dancer Julia Goldani Telles is 28. Actor Ciara Bravo is 26. Actor Blake Garrett Rosenthal is 19.