Pope Francis succeeds Pope Benedict XVI
YesPope Francis became the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church on March 13, 2013. He succeeded Pope Benedict XVI, who had resigned the papacy just two weeks earlier. Pope Francis, whose birth name is Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope. He was also the first pope to take the name Francis, in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi. Since his election, Pope Francis has been known for his humility and focus on helping the poor. He has also called for reform within the Catholic Church.

A series of unidentified lights appear over Phoenix, Arizona
The so-called Phoenix Lights incident occurred on March 13, 1997, when a number of strange lights were seen hovering over the city of Phoenix, Arizona. The lights were described as being red and orange, and they were visible to many people in the area. Some witnesses claimed that the lights were part of a larger craft, while others thought they might be flares or some other man-made object. The lights were even captured on video by a local news crew, but the cause of the phenomenon has never been conclusively determined.

German troops liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Kraków
Nazi troops began a brutal operation to liquidate the Kraków Ghetto, where thousands of Jews were imprisoned during the Holocaust. Over the course of the next two days, the Nazis rounded up and deported the remaining residents of the ghetto to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The Kraków Ghetto had been established in 1941, and it was one of the largest ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland. It was home to more than 60,000 Jews, and it was a scene of intense suffering and death before its liquidation in 1943.

Uranus is discovered
The planet Uranus was discovered by the English astronomer William Herschel. Herschel was surveying the night sky with a telescope when he noticed a star that was moving across the sky in a way that other stars didn’t. After observing it over a period of time, he realized that it wasn’t a star, but a planet that had never been seen before. Herschel named the planet after the Greek god of the sky, Uranus. It took more than 70 years for Uranus to be visited by a spacecraft, when Voyager 2 flew by the planet in 1986.