Today in History for March 12:
In 1664, England's King Charles II granted an area of land in present-day North America known as New Netherland to his brother James, the Duke of York.
In 1795, William Lyon Mackenzie, who led the 1837 rebellion in Upper Canada, now Ontario, was born in Toronto. He became the city's first mayor in 1834.
In 1820, Alexander MacKenzie, the first explorer to reach the Pacific Ocean over land, died in Scotland at age 56.
In 1821, John Abbott, Canada's third prime minister, was born in St-Andre-Est, Lower Canada -- now Quebec. He died in 1893.
In 1832, Charles Boycott was born in England. In 1880, as an estate agent in Ireland, he issued eviction notices to a group of tenants who had requested lower rents. The tenants retaliated by refusing to deal with him, and the term boycott was born.
In 1879, Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald introduced his National Policy. It included protective tariffs, plans to complete the transcontinental railway and encouraging immigrants to settle in Western Canada.
In 1883, the first steel arrived in Port Moody, B.C., for construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
In 1903, the third session of the ninth Parliament opened; measures included authority for the Grand Trunk Railway to build a transcontinental line and putting a head tax of $500 on Chinese immigrants.
In 1908, Canadian Frederick Baldwin became the first British subject to fly an airplane. It crashed in Lake Keuka, N.Y.
In 1912, Juliette Gordon Low of Savannah, Ga., founded the Girl Guides, which later became the Girl Scouts of America.
In 1912, Canadian poet Irving Layton was born in Romania. He published more than 40 books of poetry and prose over more than five decades, was named to the Order of Canada in 1976 and was nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature in 1982. He died Jan. 4, 2006.
In 1921, the Canadian Authors Association was founded in Montreal.
In 1930, First World War flying ace Billy Barker was killed in a plane crash in Ottawa. Barker shot down 53 enemy planes during the war and was awarded the Victoria Cross for his single-handed combat against some 60 German aircraft in October 1918.
In 1930, Indian political and spiritual leader Mohandas K. Gandhi began a 320-km march to the Indian ocean to protest a British tax on salt.
In 1933, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered the first of his 30 radio "fireside chats," telling Americans what was being done to deal with the nation's economic crisis.
In 1933, the swastika became the official flag of Germany.
In 1938, Germany invaded Austria.
In 1945, Anne Frank, the Dutch Jewish teenager who kept a diary of her wartime experiences, died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. She was 15.
In 1951, the "Dennis the Menace" comic strip first appeared.
In 1959, the U.S. Senate voted to admit Hawaii as the 50th state.
In 1964, Ontario Education Minister Bill Davis abolished the law segregating white and black schools.
In 1966, Chicago Blackhawks winger Bobby Hull became the first player in the NHL to score more than 50 goals in a season, getting his 51st goal against the New York Rangers. When he retired in 1980, his combined totals in the NHL and WHA made him the highest-scoring left wing in pro hockey history with 1,018 goals and 2,017 points.
In 1980, a Chicago jury found John Wayne Gacy Jr. guilty of the murders of 33 men and boys. The next day, Gacy was sentenced to death; he was executed in May 1994.
In 1985, three men stormed the Turkish Embassy in Ottawa, killing the embassy security guard. They occupied the embassy for four hours, holding hostage the wife and daughter of the ambassador and embassy staff, before surrendering to police. The attackers, who said they were members of the Armenian Revolutionary Army, told police they staged the attack "to make Turkey pay for the Armenian genocide" of 1915.
In 1987, Brian Orser of Penetanguishene, Ont., became the first Canadian since 1963 to win the men's world figure skating championships.
In 1987, the first custody trial to test a surrogate motherhood contract ended in New Jersey. The judge eventually awarded custody of "Baby M" to her biological father, William Stern, and his wife. Surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead had agreed to bear the child for $10,000 but later declined the money and attempted to keep the child.
In 1991, angry fishermen and fish-processing plant workers trashed the federal government offices in Port aux Basques, Nfld., after the winter fishing season closed early.
In 1993, a synchronized series of car bombs (13 bombs in 75 minutes) detonated and killed 250 people in Bombay, India.
In 1993, North America's east coast was battered by what was dubbed the "storm of the century." Snowfalls a metre deep were common all along the Canadian and U.S. seaboard. Whipped by strong winds, drifts ran as high as three and four metres. The storm stranded Canadians heading to Florida for spring break. It was also responsible for more than 100 deaths in Canada, the U.S., Cuba and the Gulf of Mexico.
In 1994, the Church of England ordained its first woman priest.
In 1995, former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari left Mexico for virtual exile in the U.S.
In 1997, Eaton's announced it planned to close or sell 31 of its 85 department stores across Canada as part of major restructuring.
In 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a lower court ruling that lap dancing is an indecent act.
In 1998, Mutual Life announced a takeover of Metropolitan Life for $1.2 billion with an expected loss of 1,100 jobs.
In 1998, Dr. Maurice Genereaux was stripped of his medical licence for helping two men with AIDS commit suicide. He was the first Canadian doctor to be convicted for helping a patient commit suicide.
In 2000, Conservative Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar swept to victory in Spain's general election, crushing the opposition Socialists to capture a majority in parliament for the first time.
In 2000, Pope John Paul issued a historic apology for the sins of Roman Catholics through the ages.
In 2003, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic -- a key leader of the revolt that toppled former president Slobodan Milosevic -- was assassinated by gunmen who ambushed him outside a government complex in Belgrade, Serbia-Montenegro.
In 2003, Elizabeth Smart, a Utah teenager who was abducted from her bedroom nine months earlier, was found just kilometres from her home in Salt Lake City. Self-proclaimed prophet Brian Mitchell and his wife Wanda Barzee were charged with kidnapping, sexual assault and burglary. They were convicted in December 2010.
In 2003, The World Health Organization issued a global alert following the spread of SARS at hospitals in Hong Kong and Hanoi.
In 2004, Prime Minister Paul Martin fired Business Development Bank of Canada president Michel Vennat, the fourth high-level person of the Chretien era to lose his job or be suspended in the aftermath of the sponsorship scandal.
In 2004, South Korea's parliament voted for the impeachment of President Roh Moo-hyun and suspended him from office for breaking an election rule.
In 2005, Bill Cameron, broadcaster and journalist, died at age 62.
In 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper paid a surprise two-day visit to Afghanistan in his first foreign trip since taking office, and met Canadian troops in Kandahar and Afghan President Karzai.
In 2008, Manitoba's Court of Appeal upheld the province's anti-smoking law, saying its exemption for aboriginal reserves does not violate the equality rights of non-native bar owners.
In 2008, New York state Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced his resignation amid allegations he was a client of a high-priced prostitution ring.
In 2009, U.S. financier Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty to cheating nearly 5,000 investors out of billions of dollars. In June of that same year, he was sentenced to a maximum 150 years behind bars.
In 2009, Mohammed Momin Khawaja, 29, the Ottawa software developer who was convicted of five charges of financing and facilitating terrorism for his role in a 2004 British bomb conspiracy, was sentenced to 10-and-a-half more years in a penitentiary on top of time served, with no possibility of parole for five years. It was the first sentence handed down under Canada’s 2001 Anti-terrorism Act.
In 2009, seventeen people died and one survived after a helicopter ferrying rig workers to off-shore oil-production facilities went down into the North Atlantic off St. John's, Nfld.
In 2010, David Ahenakew, a former Saskatchewan aboriginal leader who was stripped of the Order of Canada for his comments about Jews, died in hospital after a long battle with cancer. He was 76. He was found guilty in 2005 of a hate crime and fined $1,000, but the conviction was overturned on appeal in 2006 and a new trial was ordered. In 2009, he was acquitted.
In 2010, the Paralympic Games began in Vancouver with more than 1,300 athletes participating, including 55 Canadians, from 40 countries. (Russia claimed the top spot in the overall medal count with 38 followed by Germany’s 24, and Canada with 19, its best showing ever at a Winter Paralympics.)
In 2012, the biggest class-action case in Canadian history, with up to $27 billion at stake, kicked off in a Montreal courtroom where Canada's three biggest cigarette companies began their battle against a group representing all of Quebec's 1.8 million smokers.
In 2014, the last 100 Canadian Forces soldiers on duty in Afghanistan saw their three year training mission for Afghan security forces formally come to an end at a ceremonial flag-lowering at the Canadian embassy in Kabul. It followed a five-year combat mission in Kandahar, where the Canadian death toll was 158 soldiers, one diplomat, one journalist and two civilian contractors.
In 2018, cross-country skier Brian McKeever became the most decorated winter Paralympian in Canadian history when he won gold in the men's visually impaired 20-km event in Pyeongchang. It was his 11th Paralympic gold medal and 14th overall. (Before the Games closed on the 25th, McKeever won two more golds in visually impaired events.)
In 2018, Washington Capitals superstar Alex Ovechkin scored twice to reach 600 regular season goals, becoming the 20th player and fourth-fastest in NHL history to reach that milestone in fewer than 1,000 games.
In 2019, British lawmakers resoundingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit divorce deal for a second time, leaving the country's planned March 29 departure from the bloc in chaos and doubt. The House of Commons voted 391-242 against May's EU withdrawal agreement, snubbing changes she secured from the bloc to allay concerns about the deal's Irish border provisions. Lawmakers voted down the deal in January by an even bigger margin. On March 14, Parliament voted to seek a delay to Britain's planned March 29 date for leaving the E-U and push it to June 30th.
In 2020, travel restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the European Space Agency and Russia's Roscosmos to postpone a planned joint mission to Mars until 2022. The ExoMars mission to put a rover on Mars was due to launch in 2020.
In 2020, Manitoba and Saskatchewan reported their first presumptive or confirmed cases of COVID-19. Quebec Premier Francois Legault announced it was time for his province to go into emergency mode to limit the spread of the virus.
In 2020, the NHL announced the indefinite suspension of its 2019-20 season over the growing COVID-19 pandemic. The National Lacrosse League made a similar announcement. The CFL cancelled its regional and national combines and the ATP called off all men's professional tennis tournaments for six weeks. Major League Baseball announced it was suspending its season.
In 2020, the Prime Minister's Office announced Sophie Gregoire Trudeau tested positive for COVID-19. As a precautionary measure and following the advice of doctors, Justin Trudeau entered isolation for a planned period of 14 days.
In 2021, the man convicted of slaughtering his parents and four siblings in a home that later inspired the ''The Amityville Horror'' book and movies died. Ronald DeFeo died at Albany Medical Center. The 69-year-old was serving 25 years to life in the 1974 killings in Amityville, on suburban Long Island. The home became the basis of a horror-movie classic after another family briefly lived there about a year after the killings and claimed the house was haunted.
In 2023, New York-based Signature Bank shut down, two days after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
In 2024, the final report from a joint board of investigation into the statutory release of the man who killed 11 people on James Smith Cree Nation and Weldon, Sask., included 14 recommendations. It concluded there were no indicators or precipitating events that the Correctional Service of Canada and National Parole Board staff could have acted on to prevent the tragedy. Despite his 59 convictions, Myles Sanderson was released earlier in 2022 – prompting questions about why that happened and how he remained free in the months leading up to the attacks.
In 2024, the City of Richmond, B.C., urged the federal government to provide more temporary housing for refugees and asylum seekers or pay for their use of the city's homeless shelter. Coun. Carol Day said local residents experiencing homelessness had been denied shelter spaces because of the "staggering'' number of refugees and asylum seekers also in need of accommodation. Background material on the motion provided to the council said about a third of all beds at the Richmond House Emergency Shelter the previous year were occupied by asylum seekers or refugees.
In 2024, Dallas Seavey made Iditarod history as he won the world's most famous sled dog race in a record-breaking sixth championship for the Alaska musher. The 2024 race started off rough for Seavey as he had to shoot and kill a moose tangled up with his dogs shortly after the race began. Iditarod officials wound up issuing Seavey a two-hour time penalty. He still enjoyed a three-hour lead over the nearest competitor on his way to the finish line in Nome.
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The Canadian Press