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the death of Josef Stalin.
• In 1964, heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay officially changed his name to Muhammad Ali.
• In 1967, the daughter of Josef Stalin, Svetlana Alliluyeva (ah-lee-loo-YAY'-vah), appeared at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi and declared her intention to defect to the West.
• In 1970, a bomb being built inside a Greenwich Village townhouse by the radical Weathermen accidentally went off, destroying the house and killing three group members.
• In 1983, in a case that drew much notoriety, a woman was gang-raped atop a pool table in a tavern in New Bedford, Mass., called Big Dan's; four men were later convicted of the attack.
• In 1994, Greek actress-turned-politician Melina Mercouri, 73, died in New York.
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• Ten years ago: President George W. Bush, playing host to Mexican President Vicente Fox at his Texas ranch, backed off on plans to require frequent Mexican travelers to the U.S. to be fingerprinted and photographed before crossing the border, a reversal welcomed by Fox. A water taxi capsized in Baltimore's Inner Harbor, killing five people.
• Five years ago: The government reported the jobless rate reached 8.1 percent in Feb. 2009. While acknowledging an "astounding" number of job losses, President Barack Obama told critics of his $787 billion economic recovery plan in Columbus, Ohio, that it was saving jobs and said, "I know we did the right thing." NASA's planet-hunting spacecraft, Kepler, rocketed into space on a voyage to track down other Earths in a faraway patch of the Milky Way galaxy.
• One year ago: Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a critic of the Obama administration's drone policy, launched an old-style filibuster to block Senate confirmation of John Brennan's nomination to be CIA director; Paul lasted nearly 13 hours before yielding the floor. Syria's accelerating humanitarian crisis hit a grim milestone as the number of U.N.-registered refugees topped 1 million, half of them children.
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• Today's Birthdays: Orchestra conductor Julius Rudel is 93. Former FBI and CIA director William Webster is 90. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is 88. Author Gabriel Garcia Marquez is 87. Orchestra conductor Lorin Maazel is 84. Former Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova is 77. Former Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., is 75. Actress-writer Joanna Miles is 74. Actor Ben Murphy is 72. Opera singer Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is 70. Singer Mary Wilson (The Supremes) is 70.

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