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The almanac

By United Press International
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This is Friday, March 21, the 80th day of 2014 with 285 to follow.

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

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Those born on this date are under the sign of Aries. They include composer Johann Sebastian Bach in 1685; Mexican revolutionary and president Benito Juarez in 1806; Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky in 1839; theatrical impresario Florenz Ziegfeld in 1867; English theatrical director Peter Brook in 1925 (age 89); musician Eddie Money in 1949 (age 65); and actors James Coco in 1930, Al Freeman Jr. in 1934, Timothy Dalton in 1946 (age 68), Gary Oldman in 1958 (age 56) and Matthew Broderick and Rosie O'Donnell, both in 1962 (age 52).

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On this date in history:

In 1413, Henry V was crowned king of England.

In 1617, Pocahontas died in England at about age 22. Three years earlier, she converted to Christianity, took the name Rebecca and married Englishman John Rolfe.

In 1790, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia became the first U.S. secretary of state.

In 1857, 100,000 people were killed in an earthquake in Tokyo.

In 1918, U.S. and German soldiers fought the World War I battle of the Somme.

In 1945, 7,000 Allied planes dropped more than 12,000 tons of explosives on Germany during a single World War II daytime bombing raid.

In 1952, Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed organized the first rock 'n' roll concert -- the Moondog Coronation Ball.

In 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev pledged that Russia would cooperate with the United States in peaceful exploration of space.

In 1963, the U.S. prison on San Francisco Bay's Alcatraz Island was closed.

In 1965, more than 3,000 civil rights demonstrators, led by Martin Luther King Jr., began a four-day march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, Ala., to demand federal protection of voting rights.

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In 1984, a nuclear-powered Soviet submarine collided with the U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk in the Sea of Japan but no significant damage was reported.

In 1999, Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones landed near Cairo after becoming the first people to circle the globe by balloon.

In 2002, Pope John Paul II, referring to the sexual abuse scandal that had shaken the Roman Catholic clergy, wrote that "a dark shadow of suspicion" had fallen over all priests because of the behavior of those who had succumbed to "the most grievous forms" of evil.

In 2005, a 17-year-old boy at the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota killed nine people, wounded several others and then put a shotgun barrel to his chin, pulled the trigger and killed himself.

In 2010, the first eruption of a volcano in southern Iceland since the 1820s forced the evacuation of 450 people but there were no reports of injuries or major property damage.

In 2011, surgeons at a Boston hospital said they had performed the first full-face transplant in the United States on a Texas man burned in a 2008 electrical accident.

In 2013, the United States is the top destination for people who want to leave their home countries and move somewhere else permanently, a Gallup poll found.

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A thought for the day: "Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." -- C.S. Lewis

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