01|Thunderstorms and tornadoes, sweeping across Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio, leave buildings flattened, streets flooded, and 48 people dead. The largest death toll is in Arkansas, where 25 people are killed when tornadoes touch down in College Station, Little Rock, and Arkadelphia.|
02|The government of Albania loses control of most urban areas in much of the southern half of the country, where people wielding guns loot and burn offices, banks, and shops without police opposition. In an effort to avert the spread of anarchy, the government in Tirana, the capital, imposes a national state of emergency. The present public unrest in Albania was triggered by the collapse of fraudulent financial schemes, which the government failed to regulate.|
03|President Alberto K. Fujimori of Peru meets with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in Havana, Cuba, and announces that Castro has agreed, with conditions, to offer asylum to members of the Tupac Amaru, the Marxist guerrillas that continue to hold 72 people hostage in the Japanese Embassy residence in the Peruvian capital of Lima. The Tupac Amaru raided the Japanese Embassy during a holiday party on Dec. 17, 1996, and took 492 hostages, 420 of which have been released.|
04|The U.S. Congress for the eighth time in 15 years fails to pass a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget. In the Senate, Republicans vote unanimously for the amendment, but fail to rally the two-thirds majority needed for passage. Conservatives claim they will reintroduce the measure in the next Congress.|
05|Clinton Administration officials admit that Margaret A. Williams, Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief of staff, accepted--in the White House in 1995--a $50,000 campaign donation to the Democratic Party from Johnny Chung, a California businessman. Federal law prohibits solicitation or receipt of political contributions in government offices. More than $350,000 in contributions have been returned to Chung, a central figure in various investigations into improper fund-raising by the Democratic National Committee, which has returned nearly $3 million in 1996 campaign donations deemed improper or suspicious.|
06|China's legislature revises the nation's criminal code for the first time since 1979, introducing laws regulating insider trading and money laundering and eliminating laws covering a variety of "counterrevolutionary" crimes.|
07|The most severe flooding along the Ohio River since 1964 occurs when the river crests at Louisville, Kentucky, 15.7 feet (4.8 meters) above flood stage and leaves 29 people dead and tens of thousands homeless in West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky.|
07|President Bill Clinton, speaking at a press conference, states that he, like Vice President Al Gore, solicited campaign funds by telephone from the White House. While admitting that he found such calls distasteful, the president coolly defends himself and the vice president during a barrage of questions regarding political fund raising practices during the 1996 presidential election campaign.|
08|Hostage crisis negotiations between Peruvian officials and the Tupac Amaru collapse when the Marxist rebels discover that government security police are digging a tunnel beneath the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima, the capital, where the Tupac Amaru have held 72 people hostage since Dec. 17, 1996.|
09|Senator Dianne Feinstein of California announces that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned her in 1996 that the government of China, using Asian Americans, might attempt to funnel illegal political contributions to her. According to <i>The Washington Post,</i> at least six members of Congress were similarly warned about illegal foreign campaign contributions being made to gain influence in U.S. government circles.|
10|The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issues a statement refuting President Bill Clinton's claim, made during a news conference earlier in the day, that he and senior staff members had not been told that the FBI had warned White House officials in 1996 that China might be attempting to illegally funnel money into U.S. political campaigns.|
11|The U.S. Senate approves a measure to investigate "illegal and improper" campaign fund-raising activities in the executive and legislative branches of the government. The measure's scope is considerably wider than what had been planned by Republican Congressional leaders, who had attempted to limit the inquiry to "illegal activities" in the executive branch controlled by Democratic President Bill Clinton.|
12|Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto publicly apologizes for his government's "inadequate" response to a March 11 fire that triggered an explosion at the Tokaimura nuclear-waste reprocessing plant, exposing 21 workers to low-level radiation. A similar accident in December 1995 at Monju, Japan's only fast-breeder reactor, triggered widespread criticism of Japan's nuclear industry by a public highly sensitive about nuclear safety and the threat of radiation.|
13|A 23-year-old Jordanian soldier opens fire on a group of Israeli schoolgirls visiting Naharayim, an island in the Jordan River. Seven junior-high girls die and six eighth-graders are wounded before the attacker is subdued.|
13|In Tirana, the capital of Albania, looters carry off the city's dwindling food supply to the echo of gunfire in the streets, while the police arm civilians in the hope that they will defend the government of Sali Berisha, who refuses to resign the presidency. In Washington, the U.S. State Department warns that the situation will continue to deteriorate and that all 2,000 Americans in Albania should leave immediately.|
14|The giant food corporation H. J. Heinz announces that it will lay off 2,500 employees--5.8 percent of its work force--shut down at least 25 domestic and international plants, and sell its frozen-foods subsidiary, Ore-Ida Foods Inc. Prior to the reorganization announcement, Heinz disclosed that earnings for the company's third quarter, which ended January 29, rose 11 percent, to $174.4 million or 47 cents per share, over the corresponding quarter in 1996. Apple Computer Inc., struggling to survive after posting huge losses in 1996, announces that it will lay off 30 percent of its work force.|
15|Zairian rebels take the eastern city of Kisangani, a Congo River port of more than 300,000 residents, from the Serbian mercenary-backed, Zairian army, which put up token resistance. Although Kisangani is more than 750 miles (1,207 kilometers) from Kinshasa, the capital, Kisangani's fall is believed to signal the downfall of Mobutu Sese Seko, who has ruled Zaire for 31 years.|
16|Although Albanian President Sali Berisha has sent his own children to safety in Italy and his staff appears to have abandoned him, Berisha announces that he will resign only if his party loses in the parliamentary elections scheduled for June. Outside the capital, Tirana, much of the country is in the hands of armed looters, vandals, and gangs. In Albania's Adriatic ports, thousands wait to board ships for Italy.|
17|Anthony Lake, President Bill Clinton's nominee for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, withdraws his name from consideration after his confirmation, delayed for three months, is threatened with additional delays by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee. Committee chairman, Senator Richard C. Shelby (R., Ala.), suggested that improper connections might have existed between the CIA, the Democratic National Committee, and the National Security Council, which Lake headed from 1993 to 1996. Shelby demanded and received the raw, or unedited, FBI files on Lake. Writing to the president, Lake describes politics in Washington as "haywire."|
18|The Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, a panel charged with investigating illnesses associated with the Persian Gulf War (1991), presents evidence at a public meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, that the March 1991 demolition of an enemy ammunition depot in Iraq released clouds of nerve gas that may have exposed hundreds of thousands of American troops to low doses of deadly chemicals. During the same meeting, the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledges that while it knew as early as 1986 that chemical weapons were stored at the depot, the soldiers who actually blew up the Iraqi installation were not informed of its contents.|
19|Willem de Kooning, preeminent artist of the American abstract expressionism movement of the 1950's, dies at the age of 92 at his house on Long Island, New York.|
20|The Liggett Group, Inc., which manufactures the Chesterfield, L & M, and Lark brands of cigarettes, acknowledges at a Washington, D.C., news conference staged by the attorneys general of 22 states that tobacco is addictive and causes cancer. The Liggett spokesperson also concedes that tobacco companies historically have marketed their products to minors in an attempt to lure children as young as 14 years old into a lifetime smoking habit.|
21|A suicide Arab bomber blows up a crowded cafe in Tel Aviv, Israel, killing four people, including himself. The militant Islamic group Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, which damaged prospects for progress in Arab-Israeli peace negotiations.|
21|Speaker Newt Gingrich (R., Ga.) and Republican leaders in the House of Representatives crush an internal revolt against passage of a bill funding an investigation into fund-raising by President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore during the 1996 campaign. The vote took place only after dissenting Republicans met with their leadership in a three-hour, late-night session later described as "acrimonious." On March 20, the House had failed to pass a similar bill when 11 Republicans, claiming the investigation was a waste of taxpayers' money, broke ranks to join one independent and 201 Democrats, who described the investigation aimed directly at the president and vice president as "blatantly partisan."|
22|The fragile Israeli/Palestinian peace is again threatened by violent clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian residents in the West Bank city of Hebron. At least 80 Palestinians are treated for injuries during the latest round of disturbances.|
23|With antigovernment rebels advancing steadily in Zaire's six- month-old civil war, a U.S. army airborne unit lands in Brazzaville, Congo, to prepare for the evacuation of U.S. citizens from Zaire.|
24|Director of the Kenya Wildlife Service David Western announces his support for lifting a 20-year ban on big-game hunting on private land. Hunting would resume to cull overpopulations of such nonendangered species as zebra, antelope, and wart hogs, which he notes overrun farmers' fields. Bans on the hunting of elephant, rhino, lion, leopard, and buffalo would remain.|
25|The Federal Reserve banking system, under the leadership of Chairman Alan Greenspan, votes to raise interest rates for the first time in more than two years. The Fed's target rate for overnight loans between banks climbs to 5.5 percent, a jump of one-quarter of a percentage point. The move is interpreted as a measure to check the threat of inflation by keeping the economy from growing too fast.|
26|The bodies of 39 mass suicide victims are discovered in a mansion in the exclusive San Diego, California, suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. The dead--21 women and 18 men belonging to a cult named Heaven's Gate--apparently had believed that a spaceship traveling behind the Hale-Bopp Comet, currently visible in the night sky, would pick them up and transport them to a better world. They were dressed in identical black outfits and had similar, short-cropped haircuts. Under the leadership of 66-year-old Marshall Applewhite, cult members supported themselves by building commercial Web pages on the Internet.|
27|Seventeen people die in a gun battle that began when people from outside a village in central Albania assassinated a local leader. In response, villagers surrounded "the outsiders" and shot them. The incident is considered the most violent in the series of social disruptions that have left some 100 Albanians dead and the government in Tirana, the capital, reeling.|
28|Police authorities in Rancho Santa Fe, California, announce that they have identified 30 of the 39 Heaven's Gate cult members who committed mass suicide during the week of March 23. Autopsies reveal most of the suicides were the result of suffocation, from plastic bags placed over heads, after the ingestion of barbiturates and alcohol.|
29|A dozen tornadoes rampage through Tennessee, leaving more than 40 homeless. In Chattanooga, tornadoes snap trees and metal utility poles designed to withstand 160-mile- (270-kilometer)-per-hour winds, cutting power to as many as 20,000 customers. Two people were killed when the same series of storms struck Indiana and Kentucky on March 28.|
30|Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich (R., Ga.) reveals that he warned Chinese President Jiang Zemin, during a March 28 meeting in Beijing, that if Taiwan were attacked, the United States would defend it. China has claimed territorial rights over Taiwan since the Chinese Nationalists retreated to the island in 1949 after losing the civil war to the Communists. A spokesperson for President Bill Clinton responds that Mr. Gingrich is "speaking for himself," not as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, which is formulated by the president and Department of State.|
31|New York Stock Exchange prices--after falling 140 points on March 2--again plummet when the market reopens after the Easter holiday weekend. The Dow Jones Industrial stocks, a composite of the prices of 30 major companies listed on the exchange, fall 157.11 points, bringing the two-day market decline to 297.22 points, or 4.3 percent of total market value.|
