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Vietnam Veterans Day-KALW Almanac-3/28/2016

  • 89th Day of 2016 277 Remaining
  • Summer Begins in 83 Days
  • Sunrise: 6:57
  • Sunset: 7:30
  • 12 Hours 33 Minutes
  • Moon Rise: 12:33am
  • Moon Set: 10:51am
  • Phase: 69% 21 Days
  • Next Full Moon April 21 @ 10:25pm
  • Full Pink Moon, this name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.
  • Tides
  • High: 2:46am/4:37pm
  • Low: 9:40am/9:33pm
  • Holidays
  • Vietnam Veterans Day
  • National Lemon Chiffon Cake Day
  • Mom & Pop Business Owners Day
  • Smoke & Mirrors Day
  •  
  • Boganda Day-Central African Republic
  • Memorial Day-Madagascar
  • Youth Day-Taiwan
  • On This Day
  • 1848 --- For the only time in recorded history, a huge upstream ice jam stopped almost all water flow over Niagara Falls (both American Falls and the Canadian Horseshoe Falls) for 30 hours. You could actually walk out into the riverbed below the falls.
  • 1865 --- The final campaign of the Civil War begins in Virginia when Union troops under General Ulysses S. Grant move against the Confederate trenches around Petersburg. General Robert E. Lee’s outnumbered Rebels were soon forced to evacuate the city and begin a desperate race west.
  • 1886 --- Coca-Cola was created by Dr. John Pemberton.
  • 1951 --- In one of the most sensational trials in American history, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of espionage for their role in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets during and after World War II. The husband and wife were later sentenced to death and were executed in 1953. The conviction of the Rosenbergs was the climax of a fast-paced series of events that were set in motion with the arrest of British physicist Klaus Fuchs in Great Britain in February 1950. British authorities, with assistance from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, gathered evidence that Fuchs, who worked on developing the atomic bomb both in England and the United States during World War II, had passed top-secret information to the Soviet Union. Fuchs almost immediately confessed his role and began a series of accusations. Fuchs confessed that American Harry Gold had served as a courier for the Soviet agents to whom Fuchs passed along his information. American authorities captured Gold, who thereupon pointed the finger at David Greenglass, a young man who worked at the laboratory where the atomic bomb had been developed. Gold claimed Greenglass was even more heavily involved in spying than Fuchs. Upon his arrest, Greenglass readily confessed and then accused his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, of being the spies who controlled the entire operation. 
  • 1951 --- "The King and I" opened on Broadway. 
  • 1951 --- A homemade device explodes at Grand Central Station in New York City, startling commuters but injuring no one. In the next few months, five more bombs were found at landmark sites around New York, including the public library. Authorities realized that this new wave of terrorist acts was the work of the Mad Bomber.
  • 1971 --- Lt. William Calley Jr., of the U.S. Army, was found guilty of the premeditated murder of at least 22 Vietnamese civilians. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The trial was the result of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam on March 16, 1968.  (He spent three years under house arrest.)
  • 1971 --- A jury in Los Angeles recommended the death penalty for Charles Manson and three female followers for the 1969 Tate-La Bianca murders. The death sentences were later commuted to live in prison. 
  • 1973 --- Two months after the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement, the last U.S. combat troops leave South Vietnam as Hanoi frees the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. America’s direct eight-year intervention in the Vietnam War was at an end. In Saigon, some 7,000 U.S. Department of Defense civilian employees remained behind to aid South Vietnam in conducting what looked to be a fierce and ongoing war with communist North Vietnam.
  • 1974 --- The unmanned U.S. space probe Mariner 10, launched by NASA in November 1973, becomes the first spacecraft to visit the planet Mercury, sending back close-up images of a celestial body usually obscured because of its proximity to the sun. Mariner 10 had visited the planet Venus eight weeks before but only for the purpose of using Venus’ gravity to whip it toward the closest planet to the sun. In three flybys of Mercury between 1974 and 1975, the NASA spacecraft took detailed images of the planet and succeeded in mapping about 35 percent of its heavily cratered, moonlike surface.
  • 1979 --- The Committee on Assassinations Report issued by U.S. House of Representatives stated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was the result of a conspiracy. 
  • 1982 --- The combination of an earthquake and a volcanic eruption at El Chichon in southern Mexico converts a hill into a crater, kills thousands of people and destroys acres of farmland on. The eruptions, which continued for over a week, caught many of the area residents unaware and unprepared. For most of the residents living in the shadow of El Chichon (also known as Chinhonal), the 4,500-foot mountain seemed to pose no danger. Because its last eruption was 130 years earlier and minor, most people ignored its potential for destruction and enjoyed the fertile soil its volcanic past provided. However, late in 1981, two geologists, intrigued by hot springs and steaming gaps in the earth near the volcano, did an investigation that revealed increased seismic activity and the possibility of a major eruption of the volcano. Unfortunately, their report was ignored.
  • 1983 --- Erno Rubik was granted a patent for his Magic Cube. (U.S. Patent 4,378,116) 
  • 1993 --- Clint Eastwood won his first Oscars. He won them for best film and best director for the film "Unforgiven." 
  • 1998 --- Tennessee won the woman's college basketball championship over Louisiana. Tennessee had set a NCAA record with regular season record or 39-0.
  • 2006 --- Tom Jones can apparently count among his many fans one Elizabeth Windsor of London, England—known professionally as Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen. A 38-year-old mother of four when the alluring Mr. Jones made his first great splash in March 1965, Her Majesty bestowed upon him four decades later one of the highest honors to which a British subject can aspire. Queen Elizabeth II made the Welsh sensation Tom Jones—now Sir Tom Jones—a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
  • 2010 --- In Japan, the Tokyo Skytree tower became the tallest structure in Japan when it reached 1,109 feet.
  • Birthdays
  • Amy Sedaris
  • Rowland H Macy
  • Sam Walton
  • Cy Young
  • John Tyler (10th President)
  • Pearl Bailey
  • Eugene McCarthy
  • Eric Idle
  • Walt Frazier
  • Perry Farrell
  • Lucy Lawless
  • Jennifer Capriati