Chronology of news events in 2009

March 2

—Soldiers assassinate Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira, the president of Guinea-Bissau.

March 3

—Guinea-Bissau's parliamentary leader Raimundo Pereira is sworn in as the country's new president.

March 8

— Suicide bomber strikes police academy in Baghdad, killing at least 30.

March 9

—U.S. President Barack Obama lifts George W. Bush-era limits on using federal dollars for embryonic stem cell research.

March 12

—Bernard Madoff pleads guilty to pulling off perhaps the biggest swindle in Wall Street history.

March 15

—Mauricio Funes wins El Salvador's presidential election.

March 17

—French President Nicolas Sarkozy's government survives a no-confidence vote in parliament prompted by contested plans to rejoin NATO's military command.

—U.S. journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee are detained by North Korea, while reporting on North Korean refugees living across the border in China.

March 23

—Dutch judges convict a Rwandan Hutu of involvement in the slaying of two Tutsi mothers, and at least four of their children, during their country's 1994 genocide and sentence him to 20 years in prison.

March 24

—The Czech government collapses after losing a parliamentary no-confidence vote over its handling of the economic crisis.

March 25

—A 9,000-ton Greek-owned vessel with 19 crew members is hijacked off the Somali coastline.

March 26

—A 23,000-ton Norwegian-owned vessel with a crew of 27 is hijacked off the Somali coastline.

—A Soyuz capsule carrying a Russian-American crew and U.S billionaire space tourist Charles Simonyi blasts off for the international space station from the Baikonur cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan.

—The prime minister of the Czech Republic Mirek Topolanek, formally resigns, two days after his three-party coalition government looses a parliamentary vote of no-confidence.

March 27

—A suicide bomber blows up a packed mosque near the Afghan border, killing at least 48 people and wounding scores more.

—Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah appoints Prince Nayef, the kingdom's powerful interior minister and his half-brother, as the nation's second deputy prime minister.

—U,S. President Barack Obama orders 4,000 more military troops into Afghanistan, vowing to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" the Taliban and al-Qaida.

—A boat packed with migrants seeking a better life in Europe capsizes in the stormy Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya, killing at least 21 and leaving 200 missing.

March 29

—A stampede at a World Cup qualifying soccer match in the Ivory Coast kills at least 22 people and wounds 132.

March 30

—U.S. President Barack Obama asserts unprecedented government control over the auto industry, rejecting turnaround plans from General Motors and Chrysler and raising the prospect of controlled bankruptcy for either ailing auto giant.

—Pakistani commandos overpower a group of militants who has seized a police academy, took cadets hostage and killed at least six of them in a dramatic challenge to the civilian government that faces U.S. pressure to defeat Islamic extremists.