This Day In History for March 19

1799 - Napoleon Bonaparte begins siege of Acre _ now Akko, Israel _ which was defended by Turks.

1812 - Spanish Cortes passes liberal constitution under a hereditary monarch.

1861 - Maori War in New Zealand ends.

1920 - The U.S. Senate rejects for the second time the United States' involvement in the League of Nations by a vote of 49-35, falling short of the two-thirds majority needed for approval.

1932 - Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia officially opens.

1933 - Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini proposes pact with Britain, France and Germany.

1944 - Nazi German soldiers occupy Hungary.

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

1963 - Algeria demands that France negotiate on ending nuclear testing in Algerian Sahara.

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

1971 - At least 160 people perish in landslides north of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

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

1979 - U.S. House of Representatives begins televising its day-to-day business.

1987 - U.S. televison evangelist Jim Bakker resigns as chairman of his PTL ministry organization 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 center-right coalition government and give the opposition Social Democratic Party its biggest election victory since World War II; 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.

1996 - A discotheque fire kills at least 150 people in Manila, Philippines.

1997 - Police fired tear gas and warning shots in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, to quell a protest against the government's plan to use foreign mercenaries to crush a separatist rebellion.

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

1999 - A bomb shatters a packed outdoor food market in southern Russia, killing at least 56 people.

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 U.S. 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 U.S.-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 recognize 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 Mar. 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.