It’s Saturday, March 16, the 75th day of 2013. There are 290 days left in the year.
Comedian-director Jerry Lewis is 87. Movie director Bernardo Bertolucci is 72. Actor Erik Estrada is 64. Actress Kate Nelligan is 62. Rock singer-musician Nancy Wilson (Heart) is 59. Actress Isabelle Huppert is 58. Rapper-actor Flavor Flav (Public Enemy) is 54. Actor Alan Tudyk is 42. Rock musician Wolfgang Van Halen is 22.
— From wire reports
Highlight: In A.D. 37, Roman emperor Tiberius died; he was succeeded by Caligula.
In 1521, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines, where he was killed by natives the following month.
In 1751, James Madison, fourth president of the United States, was born in Port Conway, Va.
In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson signed a measure authorizing the establishment of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.
In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel “The Scarlet Letter" was first published.
In 1926, rocket science pioneer Robert Goddard successfully tested the first liquid-fueled rocket, in Auburn, Mass.
In 1935, Adolf Hitler decided to break the military terms set by the Treaty of Versailles by ordering the rearming of Germany.
In 1945, during World War II, American forces declared they had secured Iwo Jima, although pockets of Japanese resistance remained.
In 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.
In 1972, in a nationally broadcast address, President Richard Nixon called for a moratorium on court-ordered school bussing to achieve racial desegregation.
In 1983, radio and television star Arthur Godfrey died in New York at age 79.
In 1988, Protestant extremist Michael Stone launched a one-man gun-and-grenade attack on an Irish Republican Army funeral at Milltown Cemetery in Belfast, Northern Ireland, killing three of the mourners.
Ten years ago: Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein warned that if Iraq were attacked, it would take the war anywhere in the world “wherever there is sky, land or water." President George W. Bush gave the United Nations one more day to find a diplomatic solution to the standoff. American activist Rachel Corrie, 23, was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer while trying to block demolition of a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip.
Five years ago: Protests spread from Tibet into three neighboring provinces; the Dalai Lama decried what he called the “cultural genocide" taking place in his homeland and called for an international investigation into China’s crackdown on demonstrators. Actor Ivan Dixon died in Charlotte, N.C., at age 76.
One year ago: A jury in New Brunswick, N.J., convicted former Rutgers University student Dharun Ravi in the webcam spying episode that ended in the suicide of his gay roommate, Tyler Clementi. (Ravi served less than a month in jail for invasion of privacy, bias intimidation and other counts; he’s appealing his conviction.) Actor George Clooney and his father, Nick Clooney, were arrested during a protest outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington.
