Reuters historical calendar - April 28

London, Apr 27 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on April 28 since 1900: 1936 - King Faud I of Egypt died and was succeeded by his son Farouk I.

1944 - A D-Day rehearsal called Exercise Tiger ended with 750 US soldiers dead after German torpedo boats attacked their convoy ships off Slapton Sands, southwest England.

1945 - Benito Mussolini, Italian dictator, was executed by partisans near Lake Como one day after his capture.

1952 - Japan regained its sovereignty and independence when a peace treaty signed in San Francisco in 1951 came into effect.

1952 - Dwight Eisenhower was relieved at his own request of the post of Supreme Allied Commander Europe and replaced by General Matthew Ridgway.

1965 - US Marines landed in the Dominican Republic following the overthrow of the government of Donald Reid Cabral.

1969 - French President Charles de Gaulle resigned after voters rejected major government reforms in a referendum.

1977 - Andreas Baader and other members of the Baader-Meinhof urban guerrilla group were jailed for life after a trial lasting nearly two years in Stuttgart, Germany.

1980 - US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance resigned; he did not support the failed commando mission to rescue American hostages in Iran.

1989 - Argentina, hit by hyperinflation, ran out of money, leaving thousands stranded without cash.

1992 - The Afghan government formally ceded power to triumphant Islamic guerrillas in Kabul, ending 14 years of armed resistance and civil war.

1992 - Olivier Messiaen, French composer, died at 83 in Paris after a career spanning nearly 60 years.

1994 - Former CIA officer Aldrich Ames and his wife Rosario pleaded guilty to spying for Moscow. He was sentenced to life in prison.

1998 - British explorer David Hempleman-Adams reached the geographic North Pole, becoming the first person to reach the earth's magnetic and geographic poles.

2000 - Dragan Nikolic, the first suspect to be indicted by the UN tribunal for former Yugoslavia, pleaded not guilty to 80 counts of war crimes in his first appearance at the tribunal.

2001 - The world's first space tourist, American Dennis Tito, blasted off on a -million joy ride to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Russian rocket.

2002 - Alexander Lebed, governor of Krasnoyarsk and, a tough-talking general who played a key role in foiling the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev and ran for president against Boris Yeltsin five years later, died in a helicopter crash.

2002 - Ruth Handler, the inventor of ''Barbie,'' the doll for little girls that became one of the world's most popular, died at age 85.

2003 - A Russian Soyuz, the first manned spaceship to be launched since the Columbia space disaster, docked successfully with an orbiting international station.

2005 - Iraq's parliament approved a cabinet of ministers, forming the country's first democratically elected government in more than 50 years.

REUTERS KD KP113