Following are some of the major events to have occurred on March 26:
1902 – Cecil Rhodes, British-born statesman and financier, died. He became enormously wealthy from his commercial exploitation of the British African empire.
1923 – Sarah Bernhardt, French actress and the greatest “tragedienne” of her day, died.
1973 – President Anwar Sadat of Egypt took over the premiership, saying “the stage of total confrontation (with Israel) has become inevitable”.
1979 – In a ceremony at the White House, President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Begin of Israel signed a peace treaty ending 30 years of war between the two countries.
1997 – The bodies of 39 people, dressed alike and lying on mattresses or cots, were found scattered through a California mansion, members of a cult who died in a mass suicide.
1999 – Dr. Jack Kevorkian, assisted-suicide crusader was convicted in the United States of second-degree murder for fatally injecting a terminally ill man.
2001 – Sixty-one teenage boys burned to death when fire ripped through their boarding school dormitory in Machackos town near the Kenyan capital Nairobi.
2002 – Up to 1,000 people were killed when a series of quakes struck Baghlan Province in Afghanistan, about 160 km (100 miles) north of Kabul.
2003 – Daniel Patrick Moynihan, U.S. senator, died. He helped shape a generation of Democratic thinkers and was the only person to serve in the highest levels of four successive administrations – John Kennedy through Gerald Ford. He was 76.
2005 – Former British Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, who presided over a chaotic winter of strikes in 1978-79, died on the eve of his 93rd birthday.
2007 – South Korean researchers announce they have created the world’s first cloned wolves.
(Reuters)
