Reuters historical calendar - November 12

LONDON, Nov 11 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on November 12 since 1900: 1912 - Spanish Prime Minister Jose Canalejas was assassinated by anarchist gunman Manuel Pardinas, who then shot himself.

1912 - A search party found the remains of British explorer Captain Robert Scott and his companions after their ill-fated South Pole expedition. It was believed they had died in late March.

1918 - Austria's First Republic was proclaimed a day after the World War One armistice and the abdication of Emperor Karl I.

1919 - Ross and Keith Smith took off on the first flight from England to Australia, flying from Hounslow near London and landing at Darwin on December 13.

1923 - Adolf Hitler was arrested for a failed attempt to seize power on November eight in Germany's Beer Hall Putsch.

1927 - The first automobile tunnel, the Holland Tunnel between New York City and Jersey City beneath the Hudson River, was opened. It was designed to take 1,900 cars every hour.

1947 - Baroness Orczy, best known for her novels ''The Scarlet Pimpernel'' and ''The Elusive Pimpernel'', died.

1948 - A war crimes tribunal in Japan passed death sentences on former Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo and six colleagues on charges of breaching the laws and customs of war.

1970 - A cyclone and tidal wave hit East Pakistan. At least 200,000 people died.

1974 - South Africa was suspended from the UN General Assembly over its racial policies.

1982 - Yuri Andropov was elected First Secretary of the Soviet Communist party following the death of Leonid Brezhnev.

1990 - Emperor Akihito was enthroned in Japan amid a series of bomb explosions across the capital by leftist radicals.

1996 - A Saudi Arabian jumbo jet and a Kazakh airliner collided in mid-air over India, killing 349 people.

1998 - Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan was arrested in Rome. Turkey immediately asked for his extradition.

1999 - An earthquake rocked Turkey's northwest, killing at least 749 people.

1999 - Sir Vivian Fuchs, British explorer who made the first surface crossing of the Antarctic, died aged 91.

2001 - An American Airlines Airbus-300 flight with 260 people on board crashed after taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, hitting nearby homes.

Everyone on the plane and five people on the ground were killed.

2002 - A UN meeting on endangered species eases a 13-year-old ban on the ivory trade, allowing southern African nations to sell elephant tusks.

2003 - A judge sentenced Loik Le Floch-Prigent, former chairman of oil giant Elf to five years in jail over the misuse of millions of dollars in France's biggest corporate graft case.

2004 - A Boeing Co-led team successfully fired for the first time ''First Light,'' a powerful laser meant to fly aboard a modified 747 as part of a US ballistic missile defence shield.

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