Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe Today is March 11. On this date in 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney began a tour of several countries to try to drum up support against Iraq. But, while British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed that military action from the West against Saddam Hussein may be necessary, international support for action against Iraq appeared weak. Advertisement Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union on this date in 1985, succeeding Konstantin Chernenko. At 54, Gorbachev was much younger than his two immediate predecessors, who'd been old and sick when they took office and only lasted about a year each. Gorbachev was the LAST Soviet leader -- he watched as democratic ideas swept the Communist Bloc, country after country split from Moscow, and then lost his job when the U.S.S.R. broke up in 1991. Today, he's on the lecture circuit. More than 200 people died as a four-day snowstorm crippled New York City in 1888. It came to be known as the Blizzard of '88. Former President William Howard Taft was laid to rest on this date in 1930. He became the first president of the United States to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. It had to have been a big casket -- Taft was a big guy. Advertisement And it was on this date in 1974 that an insurance company paid out $112,000 on a life insurance policy taken out by Janis Joplin. The payment was in keeping with a court agreement that the coroner had ruled Joplin's October 1970 overdose death an accident rather than a suicide. We now return you to the present, already in progress.
