Reuters historical calendar - September 28

London, Sep 27 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on Sept. 28 since 1900: 1902 - The French novelist Emile Zola died.

1958 - French voters approved the constitution of the Fifth Republic, to be led by General Charles de Gaulle as president.

1964 - Arthur ''Harpo'' Marx died. He played a mute in the Marx Brothers films, using a taxi horn to communicate.

1966 - The French poet and essayist Andre Breton died. One of the founders of the surrealist movement, he published ''The Surrealist Manifesto'' in 1924.

1970 - The Egyptian statesman Gamal Abdel Nasser died. He staged a coup against the monarchy in 1952, named himself prime minister two years later and was elected president in 1956.

1978 - Pope John Paul I died after only 33 days in office.

He was succeeded by John Paul II.

1978 - PW Botha was elected prime minister of South Africa.

1989 - Former Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos, a war hero who became an unpopular autocrat, died in exile in Hawaii more than three years after being driven from his homeland.

1990 - A Philippines court found an air force general and 15 other soldiers guilty of the 1983 murder of politician Benigno Aquino, husband of former president Corazon Aquino, and sentenced them to life imprisonment.

1991 - The trumpeter Miles Davis, considered the father of ''cool jazz'' for his muted trumpet playing, died aged 65.

1994 - In Europe's worst peacetime maritime disaster, 852 people drowned when the ferry Estonia sank about 20 miles from the Finnish island of Utoe, en route from Tallinn to Stockholm.

1995 - Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat signed an accord at White House ceremonies establishing Palestinian self-rule in most of the West Bank.

1997 - Hong Kong's China-appointed Provisional Legislature overwhelmingly endorsed a new election law that critics said curtailed democracy in the former British colony.

2000 - Former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who led the country for 16 years, died in Montreal at the age of 80.

2003 - Althea Gibson, the first black tennis player to win the Wimbledon and US national championships, died aged 76.

2003 - Oscar-winning American stage and film director Elia Kazan, who directed film classics such as ''A Gentleman's Agreement'' and ''On the Waterfront'', died aged 94.

2005 - Japanese scientists published some of the first photographs ever taken of a live giant squid, one of the most mysterious creatures in the deep ocean.

REUTERS DKB DS1105