World/nation trivia 3-16-14

March 16:1521, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines, where he was killed by natives the following month.

1926, rocket science pioneer Robert H. Goddard successfully tested the first liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Mass.

1968, during the Vietnam War, the My Lai Massacre of Vietnamese civilians was carried out by U.S. Army troops; estimates of the death toll vary between 347 and 504.

1974, the Grand Ole Opry House opened in Nashville with a concert attended by President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat.

March 17:

1776, British forces evacuated Boston during the Revolutionary War.

1966, a U.S. midget submarine located a missing hydrogen bomb which had fallen from an American bomber into the Mediterranean off Spain.

1973, U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm, a freed prisoner of the Vietnam War, was joyously greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in California in a scene captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photograph.

March 18:

1937, some 300 people, mostly children, were killed in a gas explosion at a school in New London, Texas.

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

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.

March 19:

1918, Congress approved daylight saving time.

1920, the Senate rejected, for a second time, the Treaty of Versailles by a vote of 49 in favor, 35 against, falling short of the two-thirds majority needed for approval.

1987, televangelist Jim Bakker resigned as chairman of his PTL ministry organization amid a sex and money scandal involving Jessica Hahn, a former church secretary.

2003, President George W. Bush ordered the start of war against Iraq. (Because of the time difference, it was early March 20 in Iraq.)

March 20:

1815, Napoleon Bonaparte returned to Paris after escaping his exile on Elba, beginning his "Hundred Days" rule.

1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe's influential novel about slavery, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," was first published in book form after being serialized.

1922, the decommissioned USS Jupiter, converted into the first U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, was recommissioned as the USS Langley.

1995, in Tokyo, 12 people were killed, more than 5,500 others sickened when packages containing the poisonous gas sarin were leaked on five separate subway trains by Aum Shinrikyo cult members.

March 21:

1871, journalist Henry M. Stanley began his famous expedition in Africa to locate the missing Scottish missionary David Livingstone.

1963, the Alcatraz federal prison island in San Francisco Bay was emptied of its last inmates and closed at the order of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

1965, civil rights demonstrators led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. began their third, successful march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.

March 22:

1312, Pope Clement V issued a papal bull ordering dissolution of the Order of the Knights Templar.

1933, during Prohibition, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a measure to make wine and beer containing up to 3.2 percent alcohol legal.

1934, the first Masters Tournament opened under the title "Augusta National Invitation Tournament," which was won three days later by Horton Smith.

1984, seven people were indicted on charges of sexually abusing children at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, Calif. (Charges were later dropped against five defendants; school administrator Peggy McMartin Buckey was acquitted at trial, while her son, Raymond Buckey, was acquitted of 40 counts, and a jury deadlocked on another eight counts against him in a second trial.)

Source: Associated Press