This Day in History

Today's Highlight

1995: After giving up an attempt to become a Major League baseball player, Michael Jordan returns to pro basketball with his former team, the Chicago Bulls.

Other Notable Events

1920: The US Senate rejects for the second time the country's involvement in the League of Nations (the forerunner of the UN) by a vote of 49-35, falling short of the two-thirds majority needed for approval.

1962: Relative calm returns to Algeria after a cease-fire, ending seven years of warfare between French and Algerian Nationalists.

1970: Heads of government of West and East Germany, Willy Brandt and Willi Stoph, meet for the first time in Erfurt.

1977: The president of the Republic of Congo, Marien Ngouabi, is assassinated at his official residence in Brazzaville.

1987: US television evangelist Jim Bakker resigns as chairman of his PTL ministry organisation amid a sex-and-money scandal involving Jessica Hahn, a former church secretary.

1988: Two British soldiers are shot to death after they were dragged from a car and beaten by mourners attending an Irish Republican Army funeral in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

1989: Muslim gunners fire rockets into Christian areas of Lebanon.

1990: Latvia's political opposition claims victory in the republic's first free elections in 50 years.

1993: Georgia shoots down a Russian warplane over the separatist Abkhazia region, killing its pilot and heightening tensions between the two countries.

1994: Cambodian government seizes control of Pailin, the Khmer Rouge's main stronghold.

1995: Finnish voters throw out the centre-right coalition government and give the opposition Social Democratic Party its biggest election victory since World War II.

1998: Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic agrees to international demands to pull back special police from the troubled province of Kosovo.

2000: A mob storms the Nationalist Party's headquarters in Taiwan, forcing Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui to quit as party leader, after a humiliating election defeat.

2003: The US launches an attack against Iraq after a deadline for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to go into exile expires.

2004: A federal judge in Argentina declares unconstitutional a presidential decree that pardoned several high-ranking military officers accused of human rights abuses during Argentina's Dirty War. The ruling could pave the way for the officers to be tried for atrocities committed during the 1976-83 military dictatorship.

2005: Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters demonstrate across Europe to mark the second anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, with 45,000 marching from London's Hyde Park past the American embassy.

2006: Thousands of protesters throng the main square of the Belarusian capital of Minsk, refusing to recognise a presidential vote that appears all but certain to give President Alexander Lukashenko a third term.

2007: Five judges resign and hundreds of lawyers demonstrate to protest Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf's March 9 removal of Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, deepening a political crisis for the military leader.

2008: Belgium's political parties announce a deal to form a new national government, ending a nine-month political stalemate that had threatened to split the country along linguistic lines.

2009: Five nations bordering the Arctic Sea say the survival of polar bears depends on how well humans fight climate change, the biggest threat facing the giant carnivores.

Today's Birthdays

David Livingstone, British explorer/missionary (1813-1873); Sergei Diaghilev, Russian choreographer (1872-1929); Max Reger, German composer (1873-1916); Paul Atkinson, US guitarist/music producer (1947-2004); Ursula Andress, Swiss-born actress (1936-); Glenn Close, US actress (1947-); Bruce Willis, German-born US actor (1955-); Harvey Weinstein, film producer (1952-).