Reuters historical calendar - October 7

London, Oct 6 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on October 7 since 1900: 1908 - Crete rebelled against Turkish domination and united with Greece.

1918 - Sir Hubert Parry, English composer, died aged 70.

1919 - KLM, national airline of the Netherlands, established. It is the oldest existing airline.

1931 - The first infrared photograph was taken at Eastman Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, New York.

1940 - In World War Two, German troops invaded Romania to take control of strategic oilfields.

1949 - The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was proclaimed with Wilhelm Pieck as president and Otto Grotewohl as prime minister.

1956 - Clarence Birdseye, inventor of a process to deep freeze food for retailing, died.

1959 - Mario Lanza, US tenor and film actor, died aged 38.

His films included ''The Great Caruso''.

1959 - The far side of the moon was photographed for the first time by the Soviet Union's Luna 3 spacecraft.

1977 - The Soviet Union adopted a new constitution, replacing the one introduced in 1936.

1981 - Hosni Mubarak became acting president of Egypt following the assassination of Anwar Sadat on October 6.

1985 - Palestinian guerrillas seized the Achille Lauro, an Italian passenger ship, and threatened to blow it up if Israel did not free 50 Palestinian prisoners. Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly wheelchair-bound American, was killed.

1987 - Fiji coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka declared himself head of state of the new republic.

1990 - Sheikh Rashid bin Said al-Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and prime minister and vice-president of the United Arab Emirates, died aged 76.

1996 - IRA guerrillas bombed Britain's army headquarters in Northern Ireland, injuring 31 people and shattering an uneasy two-year peace.

1997 - The first full-scale negotiations for 76 years began on a political solution in Northern Ireland.

1999 - German firms and the government offered six billion marks to compensate hundreds of thousands of Nazi-era slaves and forced labourers.

2000 - Luxembourg's Grand Duke Jean stepped down as monarch of the European Union's smallest and wealthiest state, abdicating in favour of his eldest son, Henri.

2001 - US air strikes began against 31 military targets and training camps in Afghanistan, with British involvement.

Raids killed the 10-year-old son of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

2001 - Editorial cartoonist Herbert Block, who worked under the name Herblock, died. He was 91. The Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated cartoonist was based at the Washington Post for more than half a century and drew memorable and witty images of every president from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush.

2003 - Austrian-born Hollywood actor Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California in a recall election that saw voters throw out Democratic Government Gray Davis.

2004 - Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek won the 2004 Nobel literature prize. She is best known for her 1983 semi-autobiographical novel ''The Piano Teacher''.

2004 - Several truck bomb attacks killed 34 people and wounded 120 in the Hilton hotel at the Egyptian border resort of Taba and in two other explosions at beaches near the resort.

2005 - The International Atomic Energy Agency and its head Egyptian-born Mohamed ElBaradei won the Nobel Peace Prize for fighting the spread of nuclear weapons.

REUTERS SP DS1132