The almanac

Today is Tuesday, March 11, the 70th day of 2014 with 295 to follow.

The moon is waxing. The morning stars are Mars, Mercury, Neptune, Saturn and Venus. The evening stars are Jupiter and Uranus.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Pisces. They include silent movie star Dorothy Gish in 1898; bandleader Lawrence Welk in 1903; former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1916; civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy in 1926; media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1931 (age 83); television newsman Sam Donaldson in 1934 (age 80); U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 1936 (age 78); musician Bobby McFerrin and filmmaker Jerry Zucker ("Airplane!," the "Naked Gun" movies), both in 1950 (age 64); author Douglas Adams ("Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") in 1952; singer Lisa Loeb in 1968 (age 46), director and producer Peter Berg in 1962 (age 52); and actors Alex Kingston in 1963 (age 51) and Thora Birch in 1982 (age 32).

On this date in history:

In 1824, the U.S. War Department created the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

In 1845, John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, died in Allen County, Ind.

In 1851, "Rigoletto" by Giuseppe Verdi preformed for the first time.

In 1861, in Montgomery, Ala., delegates from South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas adopted the Permanent Constitution of the Confederate States of America.

In 1888, authorities said more than 200 people had died in a four-day snowstorm that crippled New York City.

In 1918, the first cases of "Spanish influenza" were reported in the United States. (By 1920, the virus had killed as many as 22 million people worldwide, 500,000 in the United States.)

In 1930, William Howard Taft became the first former U.S. president to be buried in the national cemetery at Arlington, Va.

In 1941, the Lend Lease Bill to help Britain survive attacks by Germany was signed into law by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In 1942, after struggling to save the Philippines from Japanese conquest, U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur abandoned the island fortress of Corregidor under orders from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, leaving behind 90,000 U.S. and Filipino troops.

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev, 54, succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as leader of the Soviet Union.

In 1990, the Lithuanian Parliament declared the Baltic republic free of the Soviet Union and called for negotiations to make secession a reality.

In 1993, Janet Reno won unanimous U.S. Senate approval to become the country's first female attorney general.

In 2001, one of the worst weeks in Wall Street history began with a 436.37-point (4.1 percent) decline in the Dow Jones industrial average.(By week's end, all major indexes were down 6 percent.)

In 2004, 10 bombs exploded almost simultaneously on four commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring 1,400.

In 2006, Slobodan Milosevic, former president of Yugoslavia on trial for war crimes, was found dead in his cell at The Hague, an apparent heart attack victim.

In 2007, French President Jacques Chirac announced his retirement after more than 40 years in politics.

In 2011, Japan was hit by a magnitude-9 earthquake that struck about 230 miles northeast of Tokyo. The quake caused a tsunami that swept away people, homes, vehicles and ships. (The official death toll reached 15,800 with about 2,600 missing.)

In 2013, a federal jury found former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his friend Bobby Ferguson guilty of federal racketeering and extortion charges. (Kilpatrick was sentenced to 28 years in prison and Ferguson to 21 years.)

A thought for the day: U.S. President William Howard Taft said, "The constitutional purpose of a budget is to make government responsive to public opinion and responsible for its acts."