Reuters historical calendar - June 18

London, June 17 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on June 18 since 1900: 1902 - Samuel Butler, British novelist, died. He is best known for his autobiographical novel ''The Way of All Flesh''.

1928 - Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was lost in flight over the Arctic Ocean.

1935 - Germany signed a treaty with Britain limiting the size of the German fleet to 35 percent of that of the Royal Navy.

1953 - Egypt was proclaimed a republic with General Neguib as its first president.

1959 - Ethel Barrymore, US actress of stage and screen, died.

1964 - The first trans-Pacific telephone service using the transoceanic cable began as US President Lyndon Johnson in Washington spoke to Japanese premier Hayato Ikeda in Tokyo.

1975 - Prince Faisal Musaid was publicly beheaded in Riyadh for the assassination of Saudi King Faisal on March 25.

1979 - US President Jimmy Carter and Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev signed the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT 2) in Vienna.

1982 - The Italian Roberto Calvi, a central figure in the Banco Ambrosiano scandal that was rocking his country, was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London.

1983 - Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space, aboard the shuttle Challenger.

1996 - The US Senate's Whitewater Committee issued a scathing final report accusing President Bill Clinton and the first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, of a wide range of questionable conduct.

1997 - Turkish Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan resigned, bringing to a close a tempestuous one-year tenure as the modern republic's first Islamist leader.

1999 - The Group of Seven leading industrial countries at a summit in Cologne agreed an initiative to forgive billion in debts owed by poor countries.

2000 - Ethiopia and Eritrea sign a peace plan brokered by the Organisation of African Unity to end their two-year border war.

2002 - In Israel, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up on a Jerusalem bus during morning rush hour, killing 19 people and wounding more than 50.

2003 - Finnish Prime Minister Anneli Jaatteenmaki resigned after she used leaked secret state information on Iraq during the March 2003 parliamentary elections.

2004 - Leaders of the 25-nation EU bloc adopted an historic first constitution for a united Europe but many countries faced popular votes to secure its ratification.

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