Today is Tuesday, March 7, the 66th day of 2006. There are 299 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On March 7, 1965, a march by civil rights demonstrators was broken up in Selma, Ala., by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse.
On this date:
In 1849, horticulturist Luther Burbank was born in Lancaster, Mass.
In 1850, in a three-hour speech to the U.S. Senate, Daniel Webster endorsed the Compromise of 1850 as a means of preserving the Union.
In 1875, composer Maurice Ravel was born in Cibourne, France.
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for his telephone.
In 1911, the United States sent 20,000 troops to the Mexican border as a precaution in the wake of the Mexican Revolution.
In 1926, the first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversation took place, between New York and London.
In 1936, Adolf Hitler ordered his troops to march into the Rhineland, thereby breaking the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact.
In 1945, during World War II, U.S. forces crossed the Rhine River at Remagen, Germany, using the damaged but still usable Ludendorff Bridge.
In 1975, the Senate revised its filibuster rule, allowing 60 senators to limit debate in most cases, instead of the previously required two-thirds of senators present.
In 1981, anti-government guerrillas in Colombia executed kidnapped American Bible translator Chester Allen Bitterman, whom they accused of being a CIA agent.
Ten years ago: Three U.S. servicemen were convicted in the rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl and sentenced by a Japanese court to six and a half to seven years in prison. Bob Dole handily won the New York Republican primary.
Five years ago: Ariel Sharon was sworn in as Israel’s prime minister.
One year ago: President Bush nominated John Bolton to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The presidents of Syria and Lebanon announced that Syrian forces would pull back to Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley by March 31, but that a complete troop withdrawal would be deferred until after later negotiations. A prison fire in the Dominican Republic killed 134 inmates.
Today’s Birthdays: Comedian Alan Sues is 80. Photographer Lord Snowdon is 76. TV personality Willard Scott is 72. Auto racer Janet Guthrie is 68. Actor Daniel J. Travanti is 66. Former Walt Disney Company chief executive officer Michael Eisner is 64. Rock musician Chris White (The Zombies) is 63. Actor John Heard is 60. Rock singer Peter Wolf is 60. Rock musician Matthew Fisher (Procol Harum) is 60. Football Hall-of-Famer Franco Harris is 56. Football Hall-of-Famer Lynn Swann is 54. Rhythm-and-blues singer-musician Ernie Isley (The Isley Brothers) is 54. Actor Bryan Cranston is 50. Actress Donna Murphy is 47. Tennis Hall-of-Famer Ivan Lendl is 46. Actor Bill Brochtrup is 43. Opera singer Denyce Graves is 42. Comedian Wanda Sykes is 42. Singer-actress Taylor Dayne is 41. Rock musician Randy Guss (Toad the Wet Sprocket) is 39. Actor Peter Sarsgaard is 35. Actress Rachel Weisz is 35. Classical singer Sebastien Izambard (Il Divo) is 33. Rock singer Hugo Ferreira (Tantric) is 32. Actress Laura Prepon is 26.
Thought for Today: “Caveat actor.” (Let the doer beware.) — Latin proverb