Reuters historical calendar - August 27

LONDON, Aug 26 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on August 27 since 1900: 1916 - In World War One Romania declared war on Austria-Hungary and Italy declared war on Germany.

1919 - Louis Botha, South African Boer general, statesman and first prime minister of the Union in 1910, died aged 56.

1928 - The Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed in Paris. Named after US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, it sought to outlaw war as an instrument of national policy.

1936 - Egypt and Britain signed a treaty providing for withdrawal of British forces except in the Suez Canal area.

1939 - The world's first jet-propelled plane, the Heinkel He 178, made its first flight at Marienehe, north Germany.

1941 - Iran's government resigned two days after British and Russian troops entered the country during World War Two.

1946 - France and Laos concluded an agreement establishing a kingdom under French domination.

1962 - The US spacecraft Mariner II was launched towards Venus.

1975 - Haile Selassie, the deposed emperor of Ethiopia, died in exile aged 83.

1979 - Earl Mountbatten of Burma was killed when a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army destroyed his boat off Mullaghmore in Ireland's County Sligo. He was 79.

1990 - The United States expelled 36 out of 55 embassy staff at Iraq's Washington embassy.

1991 - Moldova declared independence from the Soviet Union.

1995 - Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation signed an agreement in Cairo to expand Palestinian autonomy from Gaza to the West Bank.

1999 - Dom Helder Camara, former Roman Catholic archbishop and renowned Brazilian human rights crusader, died aged 90.

2000 - A fire in Moscow's Ostankino TV tower, Europe's tallest structure, killed three people and crippled TV broadcasts across Russia.

2001 - Israel killed Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in a missile attack in the West Bank.

2002 - A Japanese court recognised for the first time that Japan had conducted biological warfare in China during World War Two which was never officially acknowledged by the government.

2003 - Mars passed just 55.76 million km from Earth, making it the closest such encounter since the Stone Age.

REUTERS MQA PM1007