Local

March 28, 1990: Farmstead Foods filed for reorganization under Chapter XI of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. Mayor Harlan Nelson wasn’t surprised by the bankruptcy filing.

“I presume that their money ran out,” he said. “It was their last alternative.”

March 30, 1980: Sonny Onowo, karate instructor in Albert Lea, won the Gopher State Karate Championship. Onowo, a third-degree black belt at the time, was rated No. 1 in a nine-state Midwest area.

March 24, 1980: Ronald Reagan won a straw vote ballot over other Republican presidential candidates at the Freeborn County Independent Republican Convention.

 

National

2019: A Wisconsin man, Jake Patterson, pleaded guilty to kidnapping 13-year-old Jayme Closs and killing her parents; the plea spared the girl from the possible trauma of having to testify at his trial. (Patterson was sentenced to life in prison.)

2018: A toxicology report obtained by The Associated Press revealed that the late pop music superstar and Minnesota native Prince had levels of fentanyl in his body that multiple experts described as “exceedingly high.”

2013: Italy’s top criminal court overturned the acquittal of American Amanda Knox in the grisly murder of British roommate Meredith Kercher and ordered Knox to stand trial again. (Although convicted in absentia, Knox was exonerated by the Italian Supreme Court in 2015.)

2010: Claiming a historic triumph, President Barack Obama signed a $938 billion health care overhaul, declaring “a new season in America.”

Keeping a promise he’d made to anti-abortion Democratic lawmakers to assure passage of his historic health care legislation, President Barack Obama signed an executive order against using federal funds to pay for elective abortions covered by private insurance.

Obama secretly visited Afghanistan near the front lines of the increasingly bloody 8-year-old war.

March 27, 2006: Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified at his federal trial that he was supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House.

2003: During the Iraq War, a U.S. Army maintenance convoy was ambushed in Nasiriyah; 11 soldiers were killed, including Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa; six were captured, including Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who was rescued on April 1, 2003.

American-led forces in Iraq dropped thousand-pound bombs on Republican Guard units guarding the gates to Baghdad and battled for control of the strategic city of Nasiriyah. President George W. Bush warned of “further sacrifice” ahead in the face of unexpectedly fierce fighting.

2000: In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court, in Florida v. J.L., sharply curtailed police power in relying on anonymous tips to stop and search people.

1998: Two students, ages 13 and 11, opened fire outside Jonesboro Westside Middle School in Arkansas, killing four classmates and a teacher. (The gunmen were imprisoned by Arkansas until age 18, then by federal authorities until age 21.)

1997: The bodies of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate techno-religious cult who committed suicide were found inside a rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California.

1982: Groundbreaking ceremonies took place in Washington, D.C., for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

1979: America’s worst commercial nuclear accident occurred with a partial meltdown inside the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania.

1965: America’s first two-person space mission took place as Gemini 3 blasted off with astronauts Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom and John W. Young aboard for a nearly 5-hour flight.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led 25,000 people to the Alabama state capitol in Montgomery after a five-day march from Selma to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks. Later that day, civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit homemaker, was shot and killed by Ku Klux Klansmen.

1958: Elvis Presley was inducted into the U.S. Army at the draft board in Memphis, Tennessee, before boarding a bus for Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. (Presley underwent basic training at Fort Hood, Texas, before being shipped off to Germany.)

March 26, 1945: During World War II, Iwo Jima was fully secured by U.S. forces following a final attack by Japanese soldiers.

1945: During World War II, General Dwight D. Eisenhower told reporters in Paris that German defenses on the Western Front had been broken.

1942: The first Japanese-Americans evacuated by the U.S. Army during World War II arrived at the internment camp in Manzanar, California.

March 25, 1931: In the so-called “Scottsboro Boys” case, nine young black men were taken off a train in Alabama, accused of raping two white women; after years of convictions, death sentences and imprisonment, the nine were eventually vindicated.

1898: The U.S. Supreme Court, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, ruled 6-2 that Wong, who was born in the United States to Chinese immigrants, was an American citizen.

1775: Patrick Henry delivered an address to the Virginia Provincial Convention in which he is said to have declared, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”