Friday, March 23
2007-03-23 08:21
Today is Friday, March 23, the 82nd day of 2007. There are 283
days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1568 - Treaty of Longjumean ends Second War of Religion in
France.
1743 - George Frideric Handel's oratorio Messiah has its
London premiere.
1775 - Patrick Henry calls for America's independence from
Britain, telling the Virginia Provincial Convention, "Give me
liberty, or give me death!"
1792 - Joseph Haydn's Symphony No 94 in G Major, also known as
the Surprise Symphony, is performed publicly for the first time,
in London.
1801 - Russia's Czar Paul I is assassinated by Russian
aristocrats and succeeded by Alexander I.
1806 - Explorers Lewis and Clark, having reached the Pacific
coast, begin their journey back east.
1848 - First organised band of settlers lands at Dunedin, New
Zealand.
1861 - Italy institutes its first government under Count Camillo
di Cavour.
1918 - Lithuania proclaims its independence.
1919 - Benito Mussolini founds fascist movement in Italy.
1933 - German Reichstag grants Adolf Hitler dictatorial powers
until April 1937.
1935 - Soviet Union sells its interest in Chinese Eastern
railway to Japan.
1942 - Program of moving Japanese-Americans from their homes on
US West Coast to inland detention centres during World War II
begins.
1956 - Pakistan becomes an independent republic within the
British Commonwealth.
1962 - French government uses fighter planes and tanks in
attempt to end insurrection by European rightists in Algeria.
1978 - US Senate raises the mandatory retirement age to 70.
1981 - US Supreme Court rules that states could require, with
some exceptions, parental notification when teenage girls seek
abortions.
1988 - Contra guerrillas sign a cease-fire agreement with the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
1989 - Police clash with thousands of ethnic Albanian
demonstrators in Kosovo province, Yugoslavia.
1990 - Soviet government orders Western diplomats to leave and
restricts entry of foreigners into Lithuania.
1992 - Tens of thousands of jubilant Albanians celebrate a
crushing election victory by the Democratic party, marking the end
of Communist power.
1994 - Luis Donaldo Colosio, presidential candidate of Mexico's
governing party, is assassinated in Tijuana.
1995 - After months of political wrangling, Renato Ruggiero is
named the first head of the World Trade Organisation.
1998 - President Boris Yeltsin fires his prime minister and the
entire Cabinet in Russia's biggest government shake-up since the
breakup of the Soviet Union.
1999 - Gunmen open fire on the car of Vice President Luis Argana
of Paraguay, killing him and throwing the young democracy into
turmoil.
2000 - Clearing the last major obstacle to compensating aging
victims of Nazi-era forced and slave labour, negotiators agree on
how to divide a $5bn German fund with hopes of starting
payments by year's end.
2001 - The Mir space station returns to Earth, ending its
15-year, 3.5 billion-kilometre odyssey with a fiery plunge into the
South Pacific.
2002 - Egypt's state security court finds Sherif al-Filali, an
Egyptian engineer, guilty of spying on behalf of Israel, and
sentences him to 15 years in prison with hard labour.
2003 - Slovenia votes to support its 2004 induction into the
European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
2004 - Former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix says UN
inspectors would have been able to determine that Iraq did not have
weapons of mass destruction had the United States and Britain
allowed more time for them to work before going to war.
2005 - Marxist rebels in southern Colombia ambush a military
convoy with explosives and gunfire, killing 10 Colombian Marines.
2006 - A tour bus swerves to avoid an approaching truck and
tumbles 300 feet down a mountainside in northern Chile, killing 12
American tourists.
Today's Birthdays:
Erich Fromm, German-born US psychoanalyst (1900-1980); Joan
Crawford, US actress (1908-1977); Akira Kurosawa, Japanese film
director (1910-1998); Wernher von Braun, German-born rocket expert
(1912-1977); Ric Ocasek, British rock singer/producer (1949--);
Chaka Khan, US singer (1953--).
Thought For Today:
In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths
- Graham Greene (1904-1991).