Local

March 18, 1990: The Albert Lea Technical College Foundation voted to set aside $10,000 to retrain people who were laid off because of cutback in Freeborn County.

Former state Rep. Jeff Conway pleaded guilty to four counts of felony theft and admitted mishandling more than $93,000 in clients’ funds while he was an investment agent.

March 17, 1990: Curt and Judy Nelson of rural Freeborn were named Farm Family of the Year during Ag Days at Skyline Plaza.

 

National

2015: Los Angeles prosecutors filed a first-degree murder charge against real estate heir Robert Durst in the killing of his friend, Susan Berman, who had acted as Durst’s spokeswoman after his wife, Kathleen, disappeared in 1982. (Durst is now on trial in Los Angeles.)

2010: President Barack Obama signed into law a $38 billion jobs bill containing a modest mix of tax breaks and spending designed to encourage the private sector to start hiring again.

2007: Former Vice President Al Gore made an emotional return to Congress as he pleaded with House and Senate committees to fight global warming; skeptical Republicans questioned the science behind his climate-change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

2006: The social media website Twitter was established with the sending of the first “tweet” by co-founder Jack Dorsey, who wrote: “just setting up my twttr.”

2005: Baseball players told Congress that steroids were a problem in the sport; stars Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa testified they hadn’t used them while Mark McGwire refused to say whether he had. (McGwire owned up to steroid use in January 2010.)

2004: Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide rallied against the U.S.-led war in Iraq on the first anniversary of the start of the conflict.

2003: President George W. Bush ordered the start of war against Iraq.

1996: Rejecting an insanity defense, a jury in Dedham, Massachusetts, convicted John C. Salvi III of murdering two women in attacks at two Boston-area abortion clinics in December 1994. (Salvi later committed suicide in his prison cell.)

A jury in Los Angeles convicted Erik and Lyle Menendez of first-degree murder in the shotgun slayings of their wealthy parents. (They were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.)

1994: Figure skater Tonya Harding pleaded guilty in Portland, Oregon, to conspiracy to hinder prosecution for covering up an attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan, avoiding jail but drawing a $100,000 fine.

1993: Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White announced plans to retire. (White’s departure paved the way for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to become the court’s second female justice.)

1981: Michael Donald, a black teenager in Mobile, Alabama, was abducted, tortured and killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. (A lawsuit brought by Donald’s mother, Beulah Mae Donald, later resulted in a landmark judgment that bankrupted one Klan organization.)

1976: Kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst was convicted of armed robbery for her part in a San Francisco bank holdup carried out by the Symbionese Liberation Army. (Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison; she was released after serving 22 months, and was pardoned in 2001 by President Bill Clinton.)

1963: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Gideon v. Wainwright, ruled unanimously that state courts were required to provide legal counsel to criminal defendants who could not afford to hire an attorney on their own.

The Alcatraz federal prison island in San Francisco Bay was emptied of its last inmates and closed at the order of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

1953: The Academy Awards ceremony was televised for the first time; “The Greatest Show on Earth” was named best picture of 1952.

1945: During World War II, American forces declared they had secured Iwo Jima, although pockets of Japanese resistance remained.

During World War II, Allied bombers began four days of raids over Germany.

1942: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the War Relocation Authority, which was put in charge of interning Japanese-Americans, with Milton S. Eisenhower (the younger brother of Dwight D. Eisenhower) as its director.

1937: In America’s worst school disaster, nearly 300 people, most of them children, were killed in a natural gas explosion at the New London Consolidated School in Rusk County, Texas.

1933: The state of Florida electrocuted Giuseppe Zangara for shooting to death Chicago Mayor Anton J. Cermak at a Miami event attended by President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, the presumed target, the previous February.

1925: The Tri-State Tornado struck southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois and southwestern Indiana, resulting in some 700 deaths.

1776: The Revolutionary War Siege of Boston ended as British forces evacuated the city.

1762: New York held its first St. Patrick’s Day parade.