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"The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power" is a Time magazine article highly critical of Scientology that was first published on May 6, 1991, as an eight-page cover story. Written by investigative journalist Richard Behar, the article was later published in Reader's Digest in October 1991. Behar's article covers topics including: L. Ron Hubbard (pictured) and the development of Scientology, its controversies over the years and history of litigation, conflict with psychiatry and the IRS, the suicide of a Scientologist, its status as a religion, and its business dealings. After the article's publication, the Church of Scientology mounted a public relations campaign to inform the public of what it felt were falsehoods in the piece. It took out advertisements in USA Today for twelve weeks, and Church leader David Miscavige was interviewed by Ted Koppel on Nightline about what he considered to be an objective bias by the article's author. The Church of Scientology brought a libel suit against Time Warner and Behar, and sued Reader's Digest in multiple countries in Europe in an attempt to stop the article's publication there. The suit against Time Warner was dismissed in 1996, and the Church of Scientology's petition for a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States in the case was denied in 2001. Behar received awards in honor of his work on the article, including the Gerald Loeb Award, the Worth Bingham Prize, and the Conscience-in-Media Award. (more...)

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• Mykola Azarov is appointed Prime Minister of Ukraine, formally replacing Yulia Tymoshenko.
• Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, Grand Imam of al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, dies at the age of 81 during a visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
• An earthquake kills 41 people and injures at least 74 others in Elâzığ Province, Turkey.
• The Hurt Locker wins six Academy Awards including Best Picture and the first female Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow (pictured).
• A series of storms passes through Victoria, Australia, producing flash floods and 5-cm (2-in) hail in Greater Melbourne.
• Inter-religious attacks result in hundreds of deaths near Jos, Nigeria.
• Icelanders reject a plan to pay €3.8 billion to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands as compensation for the collapse of Icesave bank.
• A paper in the journal Science, authored by a team of 41 scientists, affirms that an asteroid impact likely caused the mass extinction of dinosaurs and other species 65.5 million years ago.
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March 12: Independence Day in Mauritius (1968); Arbor Day in China

• 1881 – Andrew Watson made his debut with the Scotland national football team and became the world's first black international football player.
• 1913 – The future capital of Australia was officially named Canberra during a ceremony officiated by Lady Gertrude Denman, the wife of Governor-General Lord Thomas Denman.
• 1930 – Gandhi began the Dandi March (pictured), a 24-day walk to defy the British tax on salt in colonial India.
• 1952 – Hastings Ismay was appointed as the first Secretary General of NATO.
• 1993 – A series of thirteen coordinated bomb explosions took place in Bombay, India, killing over 250 civilians and injuring over 700 others.
• 2004 – The National Assembly of South Korea voted to impeach President Roh Moo-hyun on charges of illegal electioneering and incompetence, a move that was largely opposed by the public.

More anniversaries: March 11 – March 12 – March 13