GOOD MORNING – TODAY IS FRIDAY, March 20, the 79th day of 2015 with 286 to follow. Spring, known as the Vernal Equinox, begins today, @ 6:45 p.m. EDT. Sunrise in the Boston area is @ 6:48 and sunset is @ 6:55. The New Moon is exact @ 5:37 AM. The morning stars are stars are Mercury, Neptune & Saturn. The evening stars are Jupiter, Mars, Uranus & Venus.

ON THIS DAY IN: 1413 – Henry IV of England was succeeded by his son, Henry V.

1602 – The Dutch government founded the Dutch East India Company.

1751 – King George II ascended to the throne of England.

1815 – Napoleon Bonaparte entered Paris, returning from his exile on the island of Elba, and began his 100-day rule which ended disastrously.

1816 – The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed its right to review state court decisions.

1841 – Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” considered the first detective story, was published.

1852 – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential novel about slavery, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was published.

1865 – A plan by John Wilkes Booth to abduct President Abraham Lincoln was foiled when Lincoln changed plans and failed to appear at the Soldier’s Home near Washington, D.C. Booth would later assassinate the President while Lincoln was attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre in the nation’s capital.

1897 – The first intercollegiate basketball game to use five players per team was held; Yale University beat University of Pennsylvania.

1899 – Martha M. Place of Brooklyn, New York, became the first woman to be executed in the electric chair; she had murdered her stepdaughter.

1956 – Tunisia achieved independence from France.

1969 – John Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar.

1976 – Kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst was convicted of armed robbery for her part in a San Francisco bank holdup.

1982 – American scientists returned from Antarctica with the first land mammal fossils found there.

1987 – The Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of AZT, a drug shown to prolong the lives of some AIDS patients.

1995 – A terrorist group released nerve gas on the Japanese underground subway system, resulting in the death of 12 people and the illness of 5,500 others.

1999 – Bertrand Piccard of Switzerland and Brian Jones of Britain became the first aviators to fly a hot-air balloon around the world nonstop.

2003 – U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq from Kuwait.