Today is Thursday, March 24, the 83rd day of 2011. There are 282 days left in the year.
Today’s highlight:
On March 24, 1765, Britain enacted the Quartering Act, requiring American colonists to provide temporary housing to British soldiers.
On this date:
In 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill granting future independence to the Philippines.
In 1944, in occupied Rome, the Nazis executed more than 300 civilians in reprisal for an attack by Italian partisans the day before that had killed 32 German soldiers.
In 1955, the Tennessee Williams play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” opened on Broadway.
In 1958, rock-and-roll singer Elvis Presley was inducted into the Army in Memphis, Tenn.
In 1980, one of El Salvador’s most respected Roman Catholic Church leaders, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was shot to death by a sniper as he led Mass in San Salvador.
In 1989, the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound and began leaking 11 million gallons of crude oil.
In 1999, NATO launched airstrikes against Yugoslavia, marking the first time in its 50-year existence that it had ever attacked a sovereign country. Thirty-nine people were killed when fire erupted in the Mont Blanc tunnel in France and burned for two days.
Ten years ago: Three car bombs exploded almost simultaneously in southern Russia, killing some two dozen people in the worst act of terror to hit Russia outside warring Chechnya in months. A Twin Otter plane crashed into a mountainside house on the Caribbean island of St. Barthelemy, killing all 19 people on board and one person on the ground. U.S. skater Michelle Kwan won her fourth World Figure Skating title in Vancouver, British Columbia; Irina Slutskaya of Russia got the silver, and American Sarah Hughes earned the bronze.
Five years ago: Thousands of people across the country protested against legislation cracking down on illegal immigrants. In Selmer, Tenn., Mary Winkler was charged with shooting to death her minister-husband, Matthew Winkler, in the parsonage of their church. (Mary Winkler, who said she’d been abused by her husband, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and received a three-year prison sentence, but was granted probation for most of it.)
Associated Press
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