Today is Monday, March 9, the 68th day of 2009. There are 297 days left in the year. On this date in

March 9, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

Today is Monday, March 9, the 68th day of 2009. There are 297 days left in the year. On this date in 1862, during the Civil War, the ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (formerly USS Merrimac) clash for five hours to a draw at Hampton Roads, Va.

In 1796, the future emperor of the French, Napoleon Bonaparte, marries Josephine de Beauharnais (boh-ahr-NAY’). In 1907, Indiana’s General Assembly passes America’s first involuntary sterilization law, one aimed at “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists” in state custody. (This law is struck down in 1921 by the Indiana Supreme Court, but a new law is passed in 1927 that is repealed in 1974.) In 1916, Mexican raiders led by Pancho Villa attack Columbus, N.M., killing 18 Americans. In 1932, Eamon de Valera is appointed head of government of the Irish Free State. In 1945, during World War II, U.S. B-29 bombers launch incendiary bomb attacks against Japan, resulting in an estimated 100,000 deaths. In 1954, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow critically reviews Wisconsin Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-Communism campaign on “See It Now.” In 1959, Mattel’s Barbie doll, created by Ruth Handler, makes its public debut at the American International Toy Fair in New York. In 1964, the Supreme Court, in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, rules that public officials who charge they have been libeled by news reports cannot recover damages unless they prove actual malice on the part of the news organization. In 1977, about a dozen armed Hanafi Muslims invade three buildings in Washington D.C., killing one person and taking more than 130 hostages. (The siege ends two days later.) In 1989, the Senate rejects President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of John Tower to be defense secretary by a vote of 53-47. (The next day, Bush taps Wyoming Rep. Dick Cheney, who goes on to win unanimous Senate approval.)

March 9, 1984: Paul Mehalko, ousted from his job as Sharpsville fire chief in October by Borough Council, is ordered reinstated with full benefits and back pay.

Documents filed in U.S. District Court in Cleveland relate a plot by the alleged leader of a cocaine ring to kill two Mahoning Valley crime figures, Orland Carabbia and James “Dankers” Petrella.

Winter returns to the Youngs-town area with temperatures falling to 1 degree below zero, a record for the date.

March 9, 1969: Youngstown Law Director Patrick Melillo emphatically refuses to prepare legislation permitting municipal court to detain any accused without bail on the recommendation or request of the police chief. Jack C. Hunter, 5th Ward councilman, proposed the use of “preventative detention.”

Mrs. Helen B. Pedro, 52, is shot to death in a car behind Duffy’s Tavern on Belmont Avenue. Her husband told police two robbers approached the car holding guns, one of which went off after Mrs. Pedro objected to being robbed.

March 9, 1959: A 64-year-old Penn Avenue man who approached undercover agents and asked them if they wanted to buy some whisky or wine was one of three people arrested after he led them to an East Side cheat spot.

Mahoning County Prosecutor Thomas A. Beil rules that county Coroner David A. Belinky cannot legally force the Mahoning County commissioners to provide his office money for an investigator.

A sanity hearing has been set before Common Pleas Judge David G. Jenkins for a 15-year-old Garfield Heights boy indicted in Mahoning County for first-degree murder in the shooting death of a railroad worker who refused to help the boy further in his attempt to run away from home.

March 9, 1934: The best spring retail trade in four years “now seems certain” in Youngstown following on the heels of improvement in the district’s steel industry, Dun & Bradstreet reports in the firm’s weekly business review.

Fully 75 percent of the families living in a blighted area slated for slum clearance by the Youngstown Metropolitan Housing Authority own their homes,.

“If those who charge that policemen are under orders to protect any places of vice can show that any official of the city has given such orders, I’ll remove that official at once,” Mayor Mark E. Moore says in response to a sermon by Rev. Stephen E. Palmer in Westminster Presbyterian Church.