This Day in History

Following are some of the major events to have occurred on March 29th since 1900.

1901 - Tasmania, New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia voted for members of the first Australian parliament.

1912 - The English explorer Robert Scott died as his expedition attempted to return after reaching the South Pole.

1972 - J. Arthur Rank, a leading architect of Britain's film industry, died. An enthusiastic Methodist, he initially saw films as a means of propagating the Christian Gospel.

1974 - The first close-up pictures of the planet Mercury were taken by the U.S. spacecraft Mariner 10.

1980 - The Anglo-Italian conductor and arranger Annunzio Paolo Mantovani died.

1982 - Carl Orff, German composer of "Carmina Burana", died.

1987 - A referendum in Haiti showed overwhelming support for a new constitution.

1992 - Paul Henreid, suave Austrian-born actor of stage and screen who played alongside Bogart and Bergman in "Casablanca", died.

1999 - U.S. jazz and blues singer Joe Williams died aged 80.

2000 - A U.S. Air Force report showed a link between Agent Orange and diabetes in veterans who sprayed the chemical in the Vietnam War.

2001 - A Japanese court overturned the only ruling ever to have ordered compensation for so-called "comfort women", forced to provide sex to Japanese soldiers during World War Two.

2001 - Syria's parliament unanimously approved a law allowing the establishment of private banks in the country for the first time in nearly four decades.

2004 - Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the NATO alliance, increasing its membership to 26.

2005 - An inquiry into the U.N.'s oil-for-food programme concluded that Secretary-General Kofi Annan had not interfered in the awarding of a contract in Iraq to a firm that employed his son.

2007 - Suicide bombers killed nearly 130 people in a crowded market in a Shi'ite district of Baghdad and a mainly Shi'ite town.