March 12

1912 – The Girl Guides (later renamed the Girl Scouts of the USA) are founded in the United States.

1928 – In California, the St. Francis Dam, in the San Francisquito Canyon of the Sierra Pelona Mountains, fails. The resulting floods killing 431 people.

1930 – Ben Kingsley, err Mahatma Gandhi begins the Salt March, a 200-mile march to the sea to protest the British monopoly on salt in India.

1933 – Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses the nation for the first time as President of the United States, the first of his “fireside chats”

1947 – During the beginning of the Cold War, President Truman announces his Truman Doctrine to Congress that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

1989 – English computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee submits his proposal to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, for an information management system, which subsequently develops into the World Wide Web.

1993 – North Korea announces that it will withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and refuses to allow inspectors access to its nuclear sites.

1999 – Former Warsaw Pact members the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland join NATO.

2003 – The World Health Organization officially release a global warning of outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)

2009 – Financier Bernard Madoff pleads guilty to one of the largest frauds in Wall Street’s history.

2011 – A reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant explodes and releases radioactivity into the atmosphere a day after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

2014 – A gas explosion in the New York City neighborhood of East Harlem kills 8 and injures 70 others.

2020 – The United States suspends travel from Europe due to the SARS‑CoV‑2/COVID-19 pandemic.