Reuters historical calendar - March 10

March 3 (Reuters) - Following are some of the major events to have occurred on March 10 since 1900:

1922 - Mahatma Gandhi, Indian nationalist leader, was arrested by the British government of India for sedition, for which he was to be sentenced to six years in prison.

1945 - Three hundred U.S. B-29 bombers devastated Japan's capital in what became known as the Great Tokyo Air Raid. The resulting firestorm killed 100,000 people.

1948 - Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk killed himself by jumping from a window at the foreign ministry in Prague, shortly after Soviet-backed Communists took power.

1952 - Former Cuban president Fulgencio Batista overthrew the government and began his dictatorship, which ended in 1959 when he was toppled by Fidel Castro.

1969 - James Earl Ray was sentenced in Memphis, Tennessee, to 99 years in prison for the murder of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968.

1985 - Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko died after only 13 months in office.

1990 - The American tennis player Jennifer Capriati became the youngest Grand Slam semifinalist by reaching the last four at the French Open aged 13 years and 11 months.

1993 - President Suharto, Indonesia's ruler for the previous 27 years, was elected to a sixth five-year term.

1999 - A French court sentenced six Libyans, including Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's brother-in-law, in absentia to life in prison for the bombing of a French airliner over Africa in 1989.

2000 - A Turkish court sentenced Islamist former prime minister Necmettin Erbakan to a year in jail for "provoking hatred" in a speech in 1994.

2004 - Libya signed a protocol giving the International Atomic Energy Agency the right to perform snap inspections of its atomic facilities.

2006 - NASA's $450 million Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter slipped into orbit around the Red Planet, avoiding the fate of to 50 percent or so of Mars missions that fail.

REUTERS