Reuters historical calendar - July 20

London, July 19 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on July 20 since 1900: 1903 - Pope Leo XIII died. He had been Pope since 1878.

1917 - In the Pact of Corfu, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes agreed to form a union called Yugoslavia.

1937 - Guglielmo Marconi, Italian physicist and pioneer of wireless telegraphy, died.

1944 - German officers made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler by planting a bomb under a table in the Nazi leader's ''Wolf's Lair'' headquarters in East Prussia.

1951 - King Abdullah of Jordan was assassinated while entering a mosque in Jerusalem.

1974 - Turkish forces invaded northern Cyprus, shelling Kyrenia and moving inland towards Nicosia.

1976 - The unmanned US spacecraft Viking 1 ended its 11-month journey with a touchdown on Mars and took the first photographs from the planet -- a panorama using two cameras.

1988 - South Africa, Cuba and Angola agreed in principle on a plan to end the war in Angola and grant independence to Namibia.

1989 - Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest for her outspoken attacks on the country's military rulers.

1994 - Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres became the highest-ranking Israeli official to set foot in Jordan.

2000 - Vietnam opened a stock market in Ho Chi Minh City in another step into capitalism.

2000 - Corsican nationalists accepted France's offer of unprecedented autonomy for the Mediterranean island after negotiations in Paris to end 20 years of separatist violence.

2001 - In Italy, anti-globalisation protester Carlo Giuliani was shot dead by a paramilitary policeman as the annual Group of Eight leaders' meeting opened in Genoa.

2002 - Delegates from the Sudanese government and the rebel Sudanese People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) agreed on key issues and signed the Machakos protocol to end their 19-year-old conflict.

2004 - The European Commission approved a merger between the record companies Sony Music and BMG that reduced the number of global music firms to four.

**2005 - Canada became the third country in the world to legalise gay marriages after Belgium and the Netherlands.

**2005 - Canadian-born actor James Doohan, best known as the feisty, Scottish-accented chief engineer on television's original ''Star Trek'' series -- a role immortalised by the catchphrase ''Beam me up, Scotty'' -- died aged 85.

**2005 - The last surviving Comanche ''code talker'' from World War Two, Charles Chibitty, died aged 83. Chibitty was one of the 14 Comanche tribesmen who transmitted radio messages in their native language during the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944.

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