Reuters historical calendar - March 30

LONDON, Mar 29 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on March 30 since 1900: 1925 - Rudolf Steiner, Austrian social philosopher, died.

1945 - Russian troops captured the Baltic Sea port of Danzig (Gdansk).

1950 - Leon Blum, French statesman, died. France's first socialist premier, he presided over the Popular Front coalition government in 1936-37.

1966 - Lebanese Prime Minister Rashid Karami resigned because of protests that he was the only member of the government in parliament.

1972 - Britain imposed direct rule on Northern Ireland and Brian Faulkner, prime minister of Northern Ireland, resigned.

1973 - The US military role in Vietnam came to a formal end when the last US prisoner was released and the last soldier withdrew.

1979 - An IRA car bomb killed Airey Neave, opposition Conservative spokesman on Northern Ireland, in the House of Commons car park.

1979 - The people of Iran voted overwhelmingly in a referendum in favour of establishing an Islamic Republic.

1981 - President Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest by would-be assassin John Hinckley as he left a Washington hotel.

1986 - James Cagney, US screen actor, died. His films included ''Public Enemy'', ''Angels with Dirty Faces'' and ''Yankee Doodle Dandy'' for which he won an Oscar.

1994 - The Bosnian parliament voted unanimously to set up a Croat-Moslem federation, ending more than a year of war between two of Bosnia's three ethnic factions.

2001 - Lone British rower Jim Shekhdar became the first man to row unassisted across the Pacific Ocean, but his boat was swamped just short of land and he had to swim ashore.

2002 - Britain's Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother died.

The widow of King George VI and mother of the reigning British sovereign was born into an imperial Britain in 1900 when Queen Victoria still reigned. She was 101.

2003 - In America, New York's bars and restaurants became no-smoking zones.

2004 - Alistair Cooke, the legendary British-born broadcaster best known for his BBC radio series ''Letter from America'', which ran for 58 years, died aged 95.

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