Reuters historical calendar - March 6

LONDON, Mar 5 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on March 6 since 1900: 1900 - Gottlieb Daimler, the German engineer who improved the internal combustion engine and made the first motorcycle, died.

1930 - Pre-packaged frozen food produced by the company set up by Clarence Birdseye went on sale for the first time in Springfield, Massachusetts.

1953 - Georgy Malenkov succeeded Joseph Stalin as premier and first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.

1957 - Ghana became independent from Britain.

1973 - Pearl Buck, American author of ''The Good Earth'' and winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, died.

1983 - Donald Maclean, former British diplomat and Soviet spy, died in Moscow.

1987 - The roll-on roll-off ferry Herald of Free Enterprise capsized on its way out of Zeebrugge harbour in Belgium, drowning 193 people.

1999 - The last Khmer Rouge guerrilla leader still at large, Ta Mok, was arrested close to northern Cambodia's border with Thailand.

2004 - Frances Dee, widow of the Western movie hero Joel McCrea and one of the last stars from Hollywood's Golden Age, died aged 94. Dee co-starred with the likes of Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, Frederic March, Katharine Hepburn and John Wayne.

2006 - The Republican governor of South Dakota signed a law banning nearly all abortions in the state, directly challenging the U.S. Supreme Court's legalisation of the practice 33 years previously.

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