1084        Mar 31, Anti-pope Clemens crowned German emperor Hendrik IV.

1547        Mar 31, Francis I, King of France (1515-1547), died and was succeeded by his son Henry II, who was dominated by his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, during his 12 year reign.

1790        Mar 31, In Paris, France, Maximilien Robespierre was elected president of the Jacobin Club.

1887        Mar 31, John Godfrey Saxe (b.1816), American poet, died. In 1969 he was quoted saying: “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” His poems included “The Blind Men and the Elephant” (1862).

1968        Mar 31, Pres. Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election and declared a partial bombing halt in Vietnam. The stock market soared. Citing national divisions over the war in Vietnam, Johnson declares that “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

1980        Mar 31, Pres. Carter signed the Depository Institutions Deregulation And Monetary Control Act, which deregulated interest rates.

1990        Mar 31, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev warned the defiant Baltic republic of Lithuania to annul its declaration of independence or face “grave consequences.”

1995        Mar 31, President Clinton briefly visited Haiti, where he declared the U.S. mission to restore democracy there a “remarkable success.”

1996        Mar 31, Pres. Clinton and Monica Lewinsky resumed their sexual relationship.

1999        Mar 31, On Serbian TV Ibrahim Rugova appealed for an end to NATO bombings. He had recently been quoted by a German magazine that chaos would result if NATO does not send in ground troops immediately. Serbs put Rugova under house arrest and ordered him to appear on TV.

2000        Mar 31, In Russia Pres. Putin called for a quick ratification of the START II nuclear arms reduction treaty and deeper cuts in nuclear missiles.

2003        Mar 31, NBC said it severed its relations with reporter Peter Arnett after he told Iraqi television that the US war plan against Saddam Hussein had failed. Arnett was quickly hired by London’s Daily Mirror.

2003        Mar 31, Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter (b.1907), British-born mathematician, died. He pioneered the study of higher-dimensional shapes called polytopes. In 2006 Siobhan Roberts authored “King of Infinite Space.”

2006        Mar 31, President Bush, closing a three-nation NAFTA summit, defended requiring secure documents from border-crossing Canadians and pushed Mexico to prevent more of its people from illegally entering America.

2006        Mar 31, French President Jacques Chirac offered to soften a labor law that makes it easier to fire young workers, but the student and labor leaders who have organized nationwide strikes rejected his compromise and repeated calls for the measure’s repeal.

2006        Mar 31, Abu Yousef Abu Quka, a top commander of a small militant Palestinian group, was killed when his car mysteriously exploded in flames. A shootout between rival Palestinian factions erupted shortly after the blast.

2007        Mar 31, President Bush again came to the defense of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, under criticism for his role in the firing of federal prosecutors, calling him “honorable and honest.”

2007        Mar 31, Paul Watzlawick (b.1921), Austrian-born pioneering psychotherapist, died in Palo Alto, Ca. He held that people created their own misery by trying to force self-defeating solutions to trivial problems of the ego. His 22 books included “The Situation Is Hopeless but not Serious: The Pursuit of Unhappiness” (1993).

2008        Mar 31, Gregg Bergersen (51), a Pentagon weapons analyst, pleaded guilty to giving classified information about US and Taiwanese military communications systems to Tai Kuo, a New Orleans furniture salesman working with the Chinese government.

2008        Mar 31, Chinese President Hu Jintao presided over the re-lighting of the Olympic torch in Beijing, signaling the start of an around-the-world torch relay that already has become a magnet for protesters.

2009        Mar 31, Bernardo De Bernardinis, deputy chief of Italy’s Civil Protection Department, told the people in the L’Aquila region that recent tremors over the last 4 months posed no danger. He and 6 others were later indicted following the April 6 earthquake that left 308 people dead. Their trial began in 2011. On Nov 10, 2014, an appeals court cleared the seven defendants in the case. Dr. De Bernardinis received a two-year suspended sentence for the deaths of some of the victims.

2009        Mar 31, In Qatar Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez sought Arab support for a proposed oil-backed currency to challenge the US dollar in his latest swipe at Washington’s dominance in global financial affairs.

2010        Mar 31, President Barack Obama announced an expansive new policy that could put oil and natural gas platforms in waters along the southern Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and part of Alaska.

2011        Mar 31, Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon accepted the resignation of Arturo Chavez Chavez, an attorney general known mainly for his weak image in a country fighting a drug war, and nominated Marisela Morales, his top organized crime prosecutor as a successor, the first woman to hold the post if she is approved. In Ciudad Juarez 5 people were killed at a bar called La Barritas. Gunmen assaulted another bar called El Castillo. The death toll from the attack rose to 10 after two more people died the next day from their wounds.

2012        Mar 31, Cuba said it will honor an appeal by Pope Benedict XVI and declared next week’s Good Friday a holiday for the first time since the early days following the island’s 1959 Revolution, though a decision on whether the move will be permanent will have to wait

2013        Mar 31, Afghan Pres. Hamid Karzai met with the emir of Qatar in Doha to discuss the possible opening of a Taliban office in Qatar.

2014        Mar 31, Charles Keating (b.1923), moral crusader and former Arizona land developer, died in Phoenix. He had bilked some 23,000 investors out of their savings in Lincoln Savings, a savings and loan association based in Irvine, Ca., that went bust in 1989.