Reuters historical calendar - March 23
March 16 (Reuters) - Following are some of the major events to have occurred on March 23 in history:
1919 - Benito Mussolini founded his own political party in Italy, the Fasci di Combattimento.
1933 - Germany's parliament passed the Enabling Bill, giving Adolf Hitler and the Nazis the dictatorial powers they had been seeking.
1956 - Pakistan became an Islamic Republic under its new constitution, with Major-General Iskander Mirza as first provisional president.
1966 - The Archbishop of Canterbury met the Pope in Rome, the first meeting between the heads of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches for 400 years.
1971 - Argentinian President Roberto Levingston was deposed in a bloodless coup.
1983 - Dr Barney Clark died 112 days after being the first person to receive an artificial heart at the University of Utah.
1983 - U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced plans for a new space-based defence system later dubbed "Star Wars".
1996 - Lee Teng-hui was sworn in as Taiwan's first democratically elected president.
1998 - Russian President Boris Yeltsin dismissed Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and his entire cabinet.
2001 - Remnants of Russia's Mir space station plunged into the Pacific Ocean, after engineers ended the laboratory's 15-year mission in space.
2002 - Afghan schools reopened with women teachers returning for the first time in six years and with new textbooks written by Afghan scholars in the United States.
2002 - An Egyptian engineer was found guilty of spying for Israel and sentenced to 15 years in jail with hard labour after President Hosni Mubarak overturned a previous acquittal.
2003 - Movie musical "Chicago" won the Oscar for best film at the Academy Awards. Director Roman Polanski and actor Adrien Brody also won best director and best actor for the film "The Pianist".
2004 - Mijailo Mijailovic, the self-confessed killer of Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, was sentenced to life in prison.
2004 - Seventy suspected mercenaries made their first court appearance in Zimbabwe, charged with conspiracy to overthrow the leader of Equatorial Guinea.
2006 - South African Mike Horn and Norwegian Borge Ousland became the first men to ski across the frozen Arctic Ocean, completing a gruelling, 1,000-km (620-mile) expedition from northern Siberia to the North Pole.
REUTERS
