Reuters historical calendar - March 26
March 19 (Reuters) - Following are some of the major events to have occurred on March 26 since 1900:
1902 - Cecil Rhodes, British-born statesman and financier, died. He became enormously wealthy from his commercial exploitation of the British African empire.
1923 - Sarah Bernhardt, French actress and the greatest "tragedienne" of her day, died.
1959 - Raymond Chandler, U.S. crime writer, died. Creator of the private detective character Philip Marlowe in his novels including "The Big Sleep" and "Farewell My Lovely".
1971 - Sheikh Mujibur Rahman declared East Pakistan the independent republic of Bangladesh.
1973 - President Anwar Sadat of Egypt took over the premiership, saying "the stage of total confrontation (with Israel) has become inevitable".
1973 - Women were allowed on to the floor of the London Stock Exchange for the first time.
1973 - Noel Coward, English playwright, died; he produced several films based on his own scripts, including "In Which We Serve" and "Brief Encounter".
1979 - In a ceremony at the White House, President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Begin of Israel signed a peace treaty ending 30 years of war between the two countries.
1992 - Former world heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson was sentenced to six years in prison for rape.
1997 - The bodies of 39 people, dressed alike and lying on mattresses or cots, were found scattered through a California mansion, members of a cult who died in a mass suicide.
1999 - Dr. Jack Kevorkian, assisted-suicide crusader was convicted in the United States of second-degree murder for fatally injecting a terminally ill man.
2001 - Sixty-one teenage boys burned to death when fire ripped through their boarding school dormitory in Machackos town near the Kenyan capital Nairobi.
2002 - Up to 1,000 people were killed when a series of quakes struck Baghlan Province in Afghanistan, about 160 km (100 miles) north of Kabul.
2003 - Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. senator, died. He helped shape a generation of Democratic thinkers and was the only person to serve in the highest levels of four successive administrations - John Kennedy through Gerald Ford. He was 76.
2004 - In a landmark ruling, a Japanese court ordered the government and a Japanese firm to pay 88 million yen ($830,300) in compensation to a group of Chinese for being forced to work in Japan during World War Two.
2004 - UN Secretary General Kofi Annan opened a memorial conference on the 1994 Rwanda genocide at the UN by accepting institutional and personal blame for the 800,000 deaths initially ignored by world leaders.
2005 - Former British Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, who presided over a chaotic winter of strikes in 1978-79, died on the eve of his 93rd birthday.
2007 - The U.N. mediator for Kosovo recommended supervised independence for the breakaway Serbian province, a move fiercely opposed by Serbia, but backed by the United States and European Union.
REUTERS
