Reuters historical calendar - June 17

London, June 16 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on June 17 since 1900: 1912 - American pilot Julia Clark became the first woman to be killed in a plane accident when her biplane crashed in Springfield, Illinois.

1925 - Twenty-nine countries signed the Geneva Protocol that prohibited the use of poisonous gases in war.

1939 - The last person to be publicly guillotined in France, murderer Eugen Weidmann, was executed before a large crowd at Versailles.

1940 - Marshal Philippe Petain announced that France had asked for armistice terms from Germany.

1940 - The troop ship Lancastria was sunk by enemy fire after having taken on board British troops being evacuated from France. Of the 5,300 on board, 2,480 were saved.

1940 - Red Army troops occupied Latvia and Estonia and pro-Soviet administrations were installed.

1944 - Iceland became an independent republic following a referendum on disengaging from Denmark's rule.

1947 - The first commercial round-the-world plane flight, a Pan American flight from La Guardia Field in New York, took off on what was to be a 309-hour trip.

1950 - The first kidney transplant was performed by Dr Richard Lawler of the Little Company of Mary Hospital in Chicago.

1967 - China exploded its first hydrogen bomb.

1971 - The United States and Japan signed an agreement for the return of Okinawa to Japan in 1972.

1982 - General Leopoldo Galtieri resigned as Argentine president after the country's defeat in the Falklands War.

1991 - South Africa's white-dominated parliament voted to end race classification, the legal foundation of apartheid since 1950.

1999 - The International Labour Organisation adopted a treaty banning the worst forms of child labour, including slavery and forced military recruitment.

2001 - A two-month-old movement headed by the former King Simeon II won Bulgaria's parliamentary election as the first and so far only first former monarch in eastern Europe to enter active politics in his homeland.

2002 - Egypt's top antiquities official announced that archaeologists have found the world's oldest intact sarcophagus, some 4,500 years old, near the pyramids of Giza.

2002 - Fritz Walter, former West German football team captain when winners of 1954 World Cup, died. He was 81.

2004 - Polish pro-democracy activist Jacek Kuron, whose life-long struggle against communism and trademark compassion for the poor ranked him among the greatest Poles of the 20th century, died. He was 70.

2005 - Charlie Saikley, the ''godfather of beach volleyball'' who popularised the sport in the 1960s by launching its leading tournament, the Manhattan Beach Open, died. He was 69.

REUTERS SHR VC1225