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Local

March 30, 2011: Mark Nechanicky, a fourth-grade teacher at Lakeview Elementary School, advanced to be a top 10 finalist for Minnesota Teacher of the Year. Nechanicky was Albert Lea’s 2010 Teacher of the Year.

April 3, 2011: Steve Seberson of Albert Lea was featured in the Tribune after bowling a perfect game. He rolled his sixth 300 at Holiday Lanes. Seberson was the Albert Lea Bowing Associations Bowler of the Year in 1988-89 and 1994-95.

March 29, 1971: Albert Lea sent two students to the Minnesota State Science Fair. David Carls of Brookside Junior High and Doug Denton, Albert Lea Senior High, were among 102 students accepted in the contest.

National/international

1865: Confederate President Jefferson Davis and most of his Cabinet fled the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, because of advancing Union forces.

1917: President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany, saying, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” (Congress declared war four days later.)

1932: Aviator Charles A. Lindbergh and John F. Condon went to a cemetery in The Bronx, New York, where Condon turned over $50,000 to a man in exchange for Lindbergh’s kidnapped son. (The child, who was not returned, was found dead the following month.)

1968: “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the groundbreaking science-fiction film epic produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, had its world premiere in Washington, D.C.

1980: President Jimmy Carter signed into law a windfall profits tax on the oil industry. (The tax was repealed in 1988.)

1982: Several thousand troops from Argentina seized the disputed Falkland Islands, located in the south Atlantic, from Britain. (Britain seized the islands back the following June.)

1986: Four American passengers, including an 8-month-old girl, her mother and grandmother, were killed when a terrorist bomb exploded aboard a TWA jetliner en route from Rome to Athens, Greece.

2002: Israel seized control of Bethlehem; Palestinian gunmen forced their way into the Church of the Nativity, the traditional birthplace of Jesus, where they began a 39-day standoff.

2003: During the Iraq War, American forces fought their way to within sight of the Baghdad skyline.

2005: Pope John Paul II died in his Vatican apartment at age 84.

2007: In its first case on climate change, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, ruled 5-4 that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

2011: Highly radioactive water leaked into the sea from a crack at Japan’s stricken nuclear power plant; meanwhile, earthquake-tsunami survivors complained that the government was not paying enough attention to victims.

2016: Mormon leaders meeting in Salt Lake City called on church members to practice tolerance despite political differences, providing guidance at a conference amid a presidential campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton that was marked by harsh rhetoric and bickering.

2019: Former federal prosecutor Lori Lightfoot won the runoff election for Chicago mayor, becoming the first Black woman and the first openly gay person to lead the nation’s third-largest city. Police near Los Angeles arrested a man they said had fatally shot rapper Nipsey Hussle and evaded authorities for two days; police said the two men knew each other and had some sort of personal dispute in the hours before the rapper was killed.

2020: The number of confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide passed the 1 million mark, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. The captain of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier facing a coronavirus outbreak was fired after widely distributing a memo pleading for help.

Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said Capt. Brett Crozier had demonstrated “poor judgment” in a crisis. (Modly himself would resign days later after facing a backlash over his harsh criticism of Crozier in remarks to the ship’s crew.) The government said more than 6.6 million Americans had applied for unemployment benefits in the preceding week, doubling a record high set just a week earlier.