This Day in History: Liberian Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf became the first woman to be elected head of state in Africa

Following are some of the major events to have occurred on November 23:

1890 – King William III of Netherlands died.

1976 – Andre Malraux died. French writer, adventurer, orator and revolutionary who became General Charles de Gaulle’s long-serving culture minister.

1996 – A hijacked Ethiopian AirlinesBoeing 767 with 163 passengers and 12 crew crashed into the sea off the Comoro Islands after apparently running out of fuel; 125 people died.

2001 – The U.N. war crimes tribunal charged Slobodan Milosevic with genocide in Bosnia in its third and gravest indictment against the former Yugoslav leader.

2002 – Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali was sworn in as Pakistan’s newly elected prime minister, returning the country to formal civilian rule after three years of military dicatatorship.

2003 – Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze quit, bowing to opposition protesters who stormed parliament declaring a “velvet revolution” and demanding his resignation.

2004 – Ukraine’s liberal opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko proclaimed himself president by symbolically taking the oath of office in parliament as the country faced street protests from an opposition complaining it was cheated of the presidency by the government.

2005 – Former Liberian finance minister Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf became the first woman to be elected head of state of an African country.

2007 – Former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, one of Russia’s most influential hardline spy masters, who was fired as head of the KGB in 1991 for taking part in a failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, died.

2010 – World’s largest T-shirt made to support Qatar’s bid to host the 2022 soccer World Cup.

2011 – Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh signs a deal to step down from 33 years in power following 10 months of protests against his rule.