Reuters historical calendar - October 2

London, Oct 1 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on October 2 since 1900: 1924 - Members of the League of Nations in Geneva adopted a protocol to resolve international disputes by arbitration.

1935 - Italian forces invaded Abyssinia.

1942 - The British cruiser Curacao, escorting the Queen Mary across the Atlantic, was struck by the liner during confusion over the sighting of a submarine. The Curacao sank with the loss of 338 lives.

1990 - A hijacked Chinese jet crashed into parked planes at Canton Airport after an explosion on board; 127 people died.

1996 - Former Bulgarian Prime Minister Andrei Lukanov was shot dead outside his Sofia home in an apparent contract killing.

1998 - Gene Autry, the ''singing cowboy'' whose ''Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'' sold more than 30 million copies, died.

1999 - Ali Abdullah Saleh was sworn in as Yemen's first directly elected president.

2001 - NATO formally invoked its mutual defence clause for the first time in its history after the United States produced ''conclusive'' evidence that Osama bin Laden was behind the September 11 attacks.

2001 - The Swiss flag carrier Swissair suspended all flights indefinitely after failing to find funds to keep flying.

2003 - The South African novelist J M Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Literature Prize.

2005 - Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, whose cycle of plays chronicling 20th-century African-American life brought a new frankness to the way theatre dealt with race, died aged 60.

REUTERS PB HT1038