Reuters historical calendar - March 14

London, Mar 13 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on March 14 since 1900: 1932 - George Eastman, American photographic pioneer who founded the Kodak company, committed suicide.

1938 - Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Bolshevik, was executed after being found guilty of counter-revolutionary activities and espionage in one of the most famous Soviet show trials of the 1930s.

1945 - The heaviest bomb of World War Two, the 22,000-pound ''Grand Slam'', was dropped by the British Dambuster Squadron on the Bielefeld railway viaduct in Germany.

1953 - Klement Gottwald, Stalinist president of Czechoslovakia from 1948-53, died. In the early 1950s, he staged a series of show trials against real or imagined enemies of the Communist Party.

1964 - Jack Ruby was found guilty of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of President John F Kennedy.

1976 - The American director and choreographer Busby Berkeley died. He was best known for his lavish mass choreography in the films ''42nd Street'', ''Gold Diggers of 1933'' and ''Roman Scandals''.

1979 - At least 200 people died when a Trident aircraft crashed onto a factory outside Beijing.

1991 - The ''Birmingham Six'', Irishmen wrongly convicted of the 1974 bombing of pubs in Birmingham, England, by Irish republican guerrillas, were freed after 16 years in jail.

1997 - The Academy Award-winning director Fred Zinnemann, whose classic films included ''High Noon'', ''From Here to Eternity'' and ''A Man for All Seasons'', died aged 89.

2002 - The Libyan Abdel Basset al-Megrahi lost his appeal in a Scottish court against his murder conviction for the 1988 mid-air bombing of a Pan Am airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

2002 - Ranil Wickremesinghe became the first Sri Lankan prime minister in 20 years to visit the Jaffna peninsula, epicentre of the Tamil rebellion.

2003 - US President George W Bush waived sanctions on Pakistan imposed after the military coup of 1999.

2004 - Spaniards voted out the centre-right government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar in a spectacular election upset triggered by the bombing of trains in Madrid a few days earlier, claimed by militants acting in the name of al Qaeda.

2004 - Pope John Paul II became the third longest-serving pontiff after Saint Peter and Pius IX when he completed 9,281 days in office -- some 25 years and five months.

2005 - China passed a law granting itself the right to attack Taiwan if it moved towards formal independence, drawing protests from the island.

2005 - In its annual ''Attacks on the Press'' survey, the CPJ journalists' group said that a total of 56 journalists were killed worldwide in 2004, the deadliest since 1994.

Reuters PV BS1100