Saturday, March 14, 1998
Conservative Republicans, lead by U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, R-Georgia, hold the National Town Hall Meeting on Impeachment in Marietta, Georgia, to discuss allegations of misconduct against U.S. President Bill Clinton.
The Broadway musicians union is scheduled to meet in New York to discuss a possible strike.
A 100-year-old castle provides the backdrop for a pre-St. Patrick's Day Irish Renaissance Banquet in Newport, Rhode Island.
On the horizon
On Sunday, March 15, the buzzards are scheduled to make their annual return to Hinckley, Ohio.
On Monday, March 16, representatives of the United States, China, North Korea and South Korea are to meet in Geneva for talks on the future of the Korean Peninsula.
On Tuesday, March 17, Major League Baseball owners are scheduled to meet in St. Petersburg, Florida.
On Wednesday, March 18, a drug-use trial begins in Berlin, Germany, against four former East German swimming coaches and two doctors.
On Thursday, March 19, basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is scheduled to be arraigned in Los Angeles on misdemeanor battery and false imprisonment charges. The charges may be put on permanent hold as Abdul-Jabbar has settled a civil suit with victim and agreed to undergo 36 hours of anger counseling.
On this day
In 1369, Henry of Trastamare defeated Pedro I of Castile at the battle of Montiel in the Castilian Civil War. Pedro was executed nine days later.
In 1489, Catherine Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus and last of the Lusignan dynasty, sold her kingdom to Venice.
In 1558, Ferdinand I assumed the title of Holy Roman Emperor without being crowned by the pope.
In 1590, in the French Religious Wars, Henry IV, with an army of 13,000, defeated the 25,000-strong army of the Duc de Mayenne at the battle of Ivry.
In 1647, in the Thirty Years War, a Treaty of Neutrality was signed at Ulm between France, Sweden, Bavaria and Cologne.
In 1757, British Admiral John Byng was executed by firing squad for his bungled attempt to relieve the island of Minorca threatened by the French fleet.
In 1864, Samuel Baker discovered another source of the Nile in East Africa and named it Lake Albert Nyanza.
In 1883, Karl Marx, German philosopher and economist, died in London. He published, with Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto.
In 1885, "The Mikado," the comic operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan, premiered at the Savoy Theatre, London.
In 1891, the submarine Monarch laid telephone cable along the English Channel bed to prepare for the first telephone links across the Channel.
In 1900, the United States adopted the gold standard.
In 1915, in World War I, the German cruiser Dresden was sunk by the Royal Navy in the Pacific.
In 1932, George Eastman, American photographic pioneer who founded the Kodak company, committed suicide.
In 1938, Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Bolshevik, was executed after being found guilty of counter-revolutionary activities of espionage in one of the most famous show trials of the 1930s.
In 1939, Hungary occupied the Carpatho-Ukraine and Slovakia declared its independence.
In 1945, the heaviest bomb of World War II, the 22,000-pound "Grand Slam," was dropped by the RAF's Dambuster Squadron in Germany on the Bielefeld railway viaduct.
In 1954, the Vietnamese took the Gabrielle strongpoint against the French in the battle of Dien Bien Phu.
In 1964, Jack Ruby was found guilty of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
In 1965, Israel accepted West Germany's request to establish diplomatic relations.
In 1976, Egypt formally abrogated the 1971 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union.
In 1978, Dutch marines succeeded in freeing 71 hostages held by South Moluccans for 29 hours. On June 30, the South Moluccans were jailed for 15 years.
In 1980, 87 people including a 14-man U.S. boxing team died in an air crash in Warsaw.
In 1983, OPEC agreed to cut its oil prices by 15 percent for the first time in its 23-year history.
In 1991, the emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, returned to his war-devastated homeland two weeks to the day after the Gulf War ended.
In 1991, the "Birmingham Six," six Irishmen wrongly accused of the 1974 bombing of pubs in Birmingham, England, were freed after 16 years in jail.
In 1995, Norman Thagard, the first American astronaut to fly in a Russian rocket, blasted off from the icy windswept plains of Kazakhstan.
In 1996, U.S. President Bill Clinton committed $100 million for an anti-terrorism pact with Israel to track down and root out Islamic militants.
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Holidays and more
Today is Constitution Day in Andorra.
It's the Birthday of the Sultan in Malaysia.
Former astronaut Frank Borman is 70.
Actor Michael Caine is 65.
Actor Billy Crystal is 51.
Composer, producer Quincy Jones is 65.
Cartoonist Hank Ketcham is 78.
Former baseball player Kirby Puckett is 37.
Actress Rita Tushingham is 56.
Sources: Associated Press,
Chase's Calendar of Events 1998, J.P. Morgan