Reuters historical calendar - October 8

London, Oct 7 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on October 8 since 1900: 1912 - Montenegro declared war on Turkey, beginning the First Balkan War.

1914 - The first bombing raid to cross a national border was carried out on the Zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen, Germany, by Britain's Royal Air Force, flying from Belgium.

1915 - The Battle of Loos, one of the fiercest of World War One, ended with virtually no gains for either side. Almost 430,000 French, British and Germans were killed. The British used poison gas for the first time in the battle.

1953 - The British contralto Kathleen Ferrier died of cancer at the peak of her career, aged 41.

1967 - Clement Attlee, British Labour Party prime minister from 1945 to 1951, died.

1970 - The Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

1982 - The Polish parliament dissolved Solidarity, formally ending eastern Europe's first experiment in trade union democracy.

1990 - United Germany signed its first international treaty, agreeing with Czechoslovakia on a programme for cleaning up the polluted River Elbe.

1993 - The UN General Assembly lifted almost all its remaining economic sanctions against South Africa, begun in the 1960s and built up in subsequent years because of Pretoria's policy of racial apartheid.

1996 - Palestinian president Yasser Arafat paid his first public visit to Israel for talks with president Ezer Weizman.

1997 - Tung Chee-hwa became the first Chinese leader to address Hong Kong's legislature, 100 days after Britain ceded the territory to China.

1998 - Japan formally apologised to South Korea for 35 years of harsh colonial rule.

2000 - A Syrian plane carrying officials, doctors and medical supplies landed in Baghdad, the first flight from Damascus to Baghdad in two decades.

2001 - A Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) plane crashed into an airport hangar at Milan's Linate airport after hitting a small private plane in heavy fog. All 110 people on the airliner, four on the private plane and four baggage handlers were killed.

2002 - Phyllis Calvert, famed for her roles in the Gainsborough Studio films of the 1930s and 40s, died aged 87.

Calvert, who starred in films such as ''Madonna of the Seven Moons'' and ''The Man in Grey'', was famous for portraying a string of elegant and charming women in a career spanning 65 years.

2004 - Australian Prime Minister John Howard resoundingly beat the centre-left opposition Labor party in a national election to win a fourth consecutive term in office.

2004 - The Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai won the Nobel peace prize. She rose to international fame for campaigns against government-backed forest clearances in Kenya in the late 1980s and 1990s.

2004 - The French philosopher Jacques Derrida died aged 74.

The founder of the school of deconstructionism, he argued that the traditional way of reading texts makes a number of false assumptions and that they have multiple meanings that even their authors may not have understood.

2005 - More than 73,000 people were killed died and about 3 million became homeless when an earthquake hit Pakistan occupied Kashmir and neighbouring North West Frontier Province. Another 1,300 died in Kashmir.

REUTERS PDM DS1210