The Almanac.
Today is Monday, March 13, the 72nd day of 2017 with 293 to follow. The
moon is waning. Morning stars are Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Venus.
Evening stars are Mercury, Venus, Uranus and Mars. Those born on this
date are under the sign of Pisces. They include English chemist Joseph
Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, in 1733; astronomer Percival
Lowell in 1855; baseball Hall of Fame member John Home Run Baker in
1886; publisher Walter Annenberg in 1908; bandleader Sammy Kaye in
1910; L. Ron Hubbard, science fiction writer and founder of the Church
of Scientology, in 1911; former CIA Director William Casey in 1913;
cartoonist Al Jaffee in 1921 (age 96); Helen Callaghan Candaele Saint
Aubin, known as the Ted Williams of women's baseball, in 1929;
singer/songwriter Neil Sedaka in 1939 (age 78); actor William H. Macy
in 1950 (age 66); political commentator Charles Krauthammer in 1950
(age 67); actor Dana Delany in 1956 (age 61); musician Adam Clayton, U2
bass player, in 1960 (age 57); actor Emile Hirsch in 1985 (age 32). On
this date in history: In 1781, the planet Uranus was discovered by
British astronomer William Herschel. In 1868, the Republican-dominated
U.S. Senate began impeachment proceedings against U.S. President Andrew
Johnson, a Democrat and successor to Abraham Lincoln, climaxing a
political feud following the Civil War. (He was acquitted by one vote.)
In 1881, Czar Alexander II, the ruler of Russia since 1855, was killed
in a St. Petersburg street by a bomb thrown by a member of the
revolutionary People's Will group. In 1887, Chester Greenwood of Maine
received a patent for earmuffs. In 1933, in the depths of the Great
Depression, banks throughout the United States began to reopen after a
week-long bank holiday declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a
successful effort to stop runs on bank assets. On the same day in 1933,
President Roosevelt sent word to Congress calling for the immediate
modification of the Volstead act to permit the manufacture and sale of
beer. In 1990, the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies formally ended
the Communist Party's monopoly rule, establishing a presidential system
and giving Mikhail Gorbachev broad new powers. In 1996, a gun collector
opened fire at a school in Dunblane, Scotland, killing 16 kindergarten
children and their teacher, and then himself. In 2000, the Tribune Co.
and the Times Mirror Co., media giants featuring two of the nation's
oldest and largest newspapers (Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times)
announced they would merge. In 2008, gold prices on the New York
Mercantile Exchange hit $1,000 per ounce for the first time. In 2011,
the Dalai Lama, 75-year-old spiritual leader of Tibet, formally
submitted his resignation as Tibet's political leader, a post he had
held since he was 18, to the Tibetan Parliament-in-exile. In 2013,
Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, a Jesuit, became pope
of the Catholic Church. He chose the name of Francis. In 2014, Reubin
Askew, a progressive two-term governor of Florida in the 1970s who made
a brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1983, died in
Tallahassee at the age of 85. In 2016, an explosion in the Turkish
capital of Ankara killed 37 and injured 127. Government sources said a
female suicide bomber and alleged PKK member crashed her bomb-laden car
into a bus. A thought for the day: Donald Trump said, Sometimes your
best investments are the ones you don't make. .
