Reuters historical calendar - June 24

LONDON, June 23 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on June 24 since 1900: 1901 - The first exhibition by the 19-year-old painter Pablo Picasso opened in Paris to critical acclaim.

1908 - Grover Cleveland, twice US president, died.

1916 - The first Battle of the Somme began in World War One.

1947 - An American pilot reported seeing strange objects in the sky that looked like ''saucers skipping across the water''.

This incident led to the first use of the term ''flying saucers''.

1948 - The Soviet Union began a blockade of Berlin, stopping all land traffic and food from entering the city from West Germany.

1973 - Eamon de Valera resigned as president of Ireland at the age of 90.

1978 - The president of the Yemen Arab Republic, Lieutenant-Colonel Ahmed Hussein al-Ghashni, was killed by a parcel bomb.

1983 - Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was ordered to leave Syria by President Hafez al-Assad.

1989 - China's Zhao Ziyang, who had expressed sympathy with pro-democracy students, was replaced by Jiang Zemin as general secretary of the Communist Party.

1999 - A Delta 2 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a three-year mission to look for relics of the ''Big Bang'' that brought the universe into being.

2001 - The Philippines' Mayon volcano erupted, spitting out flaming ash and boulders ''as big as trucks'' and causing at least 25,000 people to flee.

2002 - In Tanzania, a passenger train, travelling from Dar es Salaam to the northwestern town of Kigoma, rolled backwards on the track crashing into a cargo train killing 281.

2002 - US President George Bush in a speech West Asia policy offered a proposed path to a provisional Palestinian state dependent on the ouster of Yasser Arafat.

2003 - Russian President Vladimir Putin began an historic visit to Britain, in the first state visit by a Russian head of state since Tsar Alexander II in 1874.

2004 - Iraqi insurgents bloodied five cities with coordinated assaults on local security forces in which over 100 people were killed and more than 320 were wounded.

**2005 - Famed American ventriloquist Paul Winchell, best remembered as the voice of the irrepressible Tigger in the Winnie the Pooh series, died aged 82.

REUTERS SY PM1248