Reuters historical calendar - September 19

London, Sep 18 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events that occurred on September 19 in history: 1905 - Thomas Barnardo, British pioneer in social work and founder of more than 90 homes for destitute children, died.

1939 - Soviet troops reached the Hungarian frontier at the outset of World War Two and occupied the Polish city of Vilna.

1941 - The German army captured Kiev in Soviet Ukraine after a 45-day battle. On the same day, in Iran, British troops occupied Tehran.

1945 - The Irish-American William Joyce, who broadcast Nazi propaganda to Britain during the war as ''Lord Haw Haw'', was sentenced to death by a British court for treason. He was later hanged.

1955 - Encircled by revolutionary forces, President Juan Peron of Argentina resigned and fled into exile.

1957 - The United States carried out the first underground nuclear test in Nevada.

1961 - Jamaica voted in a referendum to secede from the West Indies Federation.

1983 - The Caribbean islands of St Kitts and Nevis became a sovereign state, gaining independence from Britain.

1985 - Up to 12,000 people were killed and 40,000 injured when an earthquake hit Mexico City and the adjoining region. The quake measured 8.1 on the Richter scale.

1989 - A French UTA DC-10 airliner crashed in the Sahara on a flight from Brazzaville to Paris, killing all 171 on board.

Airline officials suspected the disaster was caused by a bomb.

1991 - The newly independent former Soviet republic of Byelorussia (White Russia) changed its name to Belarus.

1994 - Thousands of US troops swept ashore in Haiti in an attempt to restore democracy.

1997 - Chinese Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin emerged triumphant from a five-yearly party congress, re-elected to the top job along with his hand-picked allies.

1998 - Fighting erupted in Liberia between government forces and supporters of ethnic Krahn leader Roosevelt Johnson.

2000 - European farmers, truckers and fishermen launched fuel protests from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, with crude oil prices close to 10-year highs.

2000 - The US Senate gave final approval to a contested bill granting permanent normal trade relations with China.

2001 - Washington ordered over 100 military aircraft to the Gulf region as US President George W Bush pressed allies for a ''global war on terrorism'' in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

2002 - Ivory Coast's former military ruler Robert Guei was killed as loyalist troops fought gun battles with mutinous soldiers resisting retirement from the army in what the government said was a failed coup.

2002 - The Bush administration officially asked S. Congress to authorise the use of force in its showdown with Iraq.

2003 - An Indian court threw out charges against Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani over the 1992 razing of a mosque in Ayodhya that triggered religious riots in which about 3,000 people died.

2004 - Jiang Zemin gave up the top job in China's military, handing over the post to Communist Party chief Hu Jintao and completing an historic transition to a younger generation of leaders.

2005 - NASA unveiled a 4-billion plan to return Americans to the moon by 2018 aboard a capsule-like vehicle that the space agency's chief described as ''Apollo on steroids''.

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