Reuters historical calendar - May 25

LONDON, May 24 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on May 25 since 1900: 1911 - President Porfirio Diaz resigned after revolutionary forces defeated government troops in the Mexican Civil War.

1915 - In World War One, the second Battle of Ypres ended with around 105,000 casualties. The Germans used poison gas for the first time.

1935 - American athlete Jesse Owens set six world records in 45 minutes at the US Big Ten Championship at Ann Arbor, Michigan.

1946 - Abdullah Ibn Hussein declared himself the first King of Jordan just two months after the British mandate ended.

1951 - Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, British foreign office officials, disappeared from London. They later surfaced in Moscow, revealing themselves as Soviet spies.

1963 - A summit conference of African states ended in Addis Ababa with agreement to set up the Organisation of African Unity.

1979 - A DC-10 crashed at Chicago's O'Hare airport killing 273 people in what was then the worst US air disaster.

1989 - Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev was elected to the new post of executive president in the Soviet Union.

1991 - Some 15,000 Falashas, or Ethiopian Jews, were airlifted from Addis Ababa to Israel as rebel forces approached the Ethiopian capital.

2001 - Alberto Korda, Cuban photographer, famed for his 1960 shot of Latin American guerrilla Ernesto ''Che'' Guevara, died. He was 72.

2004 - At least 1,950 people were killed in floods in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, many of them swept away when rain-swollen rivers burst their banks.

**2005 - Indian-born international filmmaker Ismail Merchant died aged 68. He teamed up with fellow filmmaker James Ivory and their string of film credits included hits such as ''A Room With A View,'' ''Howards End'' and ''The Remains of the Day.'' REUTERS KD HS1102