TODAY IN HISTORY

Today’s highlight:

On March 18, 1940, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met at the Brenner Pass, where the Italian dictator agreed to join Germany’s war against France and Britain.

On this date:

In 1922, Mohandas K. Gandhi was sentenced in India to six years’ imprisonment for civil disobedience. (He was released after serving two years.)

In 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 as its director.

In 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.

In 1965, the first spacewalk took place as Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov went outside his Voskhod 2 capsule, secured by a tether.

In 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.

In 2016, police in Brussels captured Europe’s most wanted fugitive, Salah Abdeslam, who was the prime suspect in the deadly 2015 Paris attacks.

In 2020, the U.S. and Canada agreed to temporarily close their shared border to nonessential travel.

Today’s birthdays:

Composer John Kander is 95. Singer Irene Cara is 63. Movie writer-director Luc Besson is

63. TV personality Mike Rowe is

60. Olympic gold medal speedskater Bonnie Blair is 58. Rapper-actor-talk show host Queen Latifah is 52. Country singer Philip Sweet (Little Big Town) is 48. Olympic gold medal figure skater Alexei Yagudin is 42. Actor-dancer Julia Goldani Telles is 27.