This Day in History

Today is Friday, March 12, the 71st day of 2009. There are 294 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight

1994: The Church of England ordains its first female priests.

Other Notable Events

641 AD: Chinese Princess Wen Cheng goes to Tibet to marry the Tibetan ruler. The marriage is the basis for China's claim to sovereignty over the region.

1832: Captain Charles Boycott, the Irish estate manager who caused boycotts, was born. He earned a reputation for unfairness that drove peasant tenant farmers in his charge to organise against him in an 1879 act of civil disobedience. Hence the derivation of the word, 'boycott'.

1868: Britain annexes Basutoland, South Africa.

1930: Indian political and spiritual leader Mohandas K Gandhi begins a 320-kilometre (200-mile) march to protest a British tax on salt.

1938: The "Anschluss" takes place as German troops enter Austria, completing Adolf Hitler's mission to bring his homeland into the Third Reich.

1939: Pope Pius XII is formally crowned in ceremonies at the Vatican.

1966: General Suharto is sworn in as acting President of Indonesia after President Sukarno is stripped of authority.

1968: Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, a British colony, proclaims its independence.

1972: Britain and China agree to exchange ambassadors, 22 years after London first recognised the Peking government.

1986: Susan Butcher becomes the first woman to win the 1,863-kilometre (1158-mile) Iditarod Sled Dog race in the Alaskan wilderness.

1988: South African government bans church-led opposition group headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as "threat to public safety".

1993: Janet Reno is sworn in as the United States' first female attorney general.

1996: Chinese combat planes and warships open eight days of war games off Taiwan meant to dampen pro-independence sentiment.

1998: Astronomers debunk a warning that a mile-wide (a 1.6-kilometre-wide) asteroid might collide with Earth on Oct 26, 2028, saying the calculations were off by 600,000 miles (965,400 kilometres).

1999: The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland join NATO in a ceremony at Independence, Missouri.

2003: Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic dies after being struck by two bullets as he walked from his car to a government building in Belgrade.

2004: Iran abruptly freezes UN inspections of its nuclear programme for a further six weeks, throwing into turmoil international attempts to verify Tehran's claims that it is developing atomic power and not weapons.

2007: Masked Palestinian gunmen kidnap BBC reporter Alan Johnston from his car in Gaza City. He remains as a prisoner of a shadowy Palestinian group for four months before being released relatively unharmed.

2008: China says it is denying mountaineers permits to climb its side of Mount Everest this spring, in an apparent bid to keep Tibet activists from disrupting plans to carry the Olympic torch up the world's tallest peak.

2009: The US National Research Council says despite years of study and analysis the world is unprepared for climate change and needs to rethink basic assumptions that govern things as varied as choosing cars and building bridges.

Today's Birthdays

Thomas Arne, English composer (1710-1778); Jack Kerouac, American writer (1922-1969); Elaine De Kooning, US painter (1929-1989); Edward Albee, US playwright (1928-); Barbara Feldon, US actress (1933-); Liza Minnelli, US singer-actress (1946-); James Taylor, US singer (1948-); Aaron Eckhart, US actor (1968-).