Today is Thursday, March 6, the 65th day of 2014. There are 300 days left in the year.
Today’s highlight:
On March 6, 1836, the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, fell to Mexican forces after a 13-day siege.
On this date:
In 1834, the city of York in Upper Canada was incorporated as Toronto.
In 1853, Verdi’s opera “La Traviata” premiered in Venice, Italy.
In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Scott, a slave, was not an American citizen and could not sue for his freedom in federal court.
In 1912, Oreo sandwich cookies were first introduced by the National Biscuit Co.
In 1933, a national bank holiday declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt aimed at calming panicked depositors went into effect. Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, wounded in an attempt on Roosevelt’s life the previous month, died at a Miami hospital at age 59.
In 1944, U.S. heavy bombers staged the first full-scale American raid on Berlin during World War II.
In 1953, Georgy Malenkov was named premier of the Soviet Union a day after the death of Josef Stalin.
In 1964, heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay officially changed his name to Muhammad Ali.
In 1967, the daughter of Josef Stalin, Svetlana Alliluyeva, appeared at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi and declared her intention to defect to the West.
In 1970, a bomb being built inside a Greenwich Village townhouse by the radical Weathermen accidentally went off, destroying the house and killing three group members.
In 1983, in a case that drew much notoriety, a woman was gang-raped atop a pool table in a tavern in New Bedford, Mass., called Big Dan’s; four men were later convicted of the attack.
In 1994, Greek actress-turned-politician Melina Mercouri, 73, died in New York.
Ten years ago: President George W. Bush, playing host to Mexican President Vicente Fox at his Texas ranch, backed off on plans to require frequent Mexican travelers to the U.S. to be fingerprinted and photographed before crossing the border, a reversal welcomed by Fox. A water taxi capsized in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, killing five people.
Five years ago: The government reported the jobless rate reached 8.1 percent in Feb. 2009. While acknowledging an “astounding” number of job losses, President Barack Obama told critics of his $787 billion economic recovery plan in Columbus, Ohio, that it was saving jobs and said, “I know we did the right thing.” NASA’s planet-hunting spacecraft, Kepler, rocketed into space on a voyage to track down other Earths in a faraway patch of the Milky Way galaxy.
One year ago: Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a critic of the Obama administration’s drone policy, launched an old-style filibuster to block Senate confirmation of John Brennan’s nomination to be CIA director; Paul lasted nearly 13 hours before yielding the floor. Syria’s accelerating humanitarian crisis hit a grim milestone as the number of U.N.-registered refugees topped 1 million, half of them children.
Associated Press
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