Following are some of the major events to have occurred on March 19:
1920 – The United States refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty, and so join the League of Nations, for fear of being drawn into a war if another member country was invaded.
1930 – Arthur Balfour, British Conservative prime minister, died. He is known for the Balfour Declaration he made as foreign secretary in 1917, which promised Jewish people a homeland in Palestine.
1932 – Australia’s Sydney Harbour Bridge opened.
1964 – The Great St Bernard Tunnel under the Alps between Switzerland and Italy opened.
2000 – Longtime opposition leader Abdoulaye Wade was elected president of Senegal, ending 40 unbroken years of Socialist Party government.
2001- Socialist Bertrand Delanoe won the mayoral election in Paris and the Left took power in the capital for the first time in 130 years.
2001 – Australia’s largest resources group, BHP, announced a $28 billion merger with London-listed Billiton to create the world’s second biggest minerals and metals giant.
2002 – Marco Biagi, an author of Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi’s controversial reforms, making it easier for firms to hire and fire employees, was shot dead in Bologna.
2007 – A methane explosion killed 110 people in a Siberian coal mine in the deadliest accident in Russia’s mining industry for at least a decade.
2008 – Visionary science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke best known for his work on the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, died aged 90.
2009 – Austria’s Josef Fritzl was sentenced to life in a secure mental unit for locking up and raping his daughter in a cellar over 24 years, fathering seven children with her and causing the death of his own infant son.
(Reuters)
