Reuters historical calendar - November 24

LONDON, Nov 23 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on November 24 since 1900: 1922 - Robert Erskine Childers, Irish author and nationalist, was executed for his support of the republican cause.

1929 - French statesman Georges Clemenceau died. Known as ''The Tiger'', he was prime minister of France twice and presided at the post-World War One 1919 peace conference at Versailles.

1944 - In World War Two the Polish prime minister in exile, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, resigned in protest at lack of support for the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans.

1963 - Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of President Kennedy, was shot dead by Jack Ruby in the underground garage of the Dallas police headquarters.

1969 - US Army Lieutenant William L Calley, charged with the massacre of over 100 civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in March 1968, was ordered to stand trial by court martial.

1976 - An earthquake struck Van province in Turkey with 5,291 confirmed dead and over 5,000 injured; 50,000 people were left homeless.

1989 - The entire presidium and secretariat of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, including leader Milos Jakes, resigned following mass demonstrations in Prague. Karol Urbanek succeeded as General Secretary.

1991 - Pop star Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the group Queen, died of AIDS.

1995 - A referendum was held in Ireland to change its Catholic constitution and end a 70-year-old ban on divorce. The final result was 50.28 per cent in favour of legalising divorce and 49.72 per cent against.

1998 - Lebanon's first new president since the end of the 15-year civil war, General Emile Lahoud, was sworn in.

2004 - French President Jacques Chirac arrived in Libya and became the first French head of state to visit Libya since it won independence from Italy in 1951.

**2005 - Hwang Woo-suk, South Korea's pioneering stem cell scientist apologised that two members of his team had donated their egg cells for research, and stepped down as the head of a global stem cell hub.

**2005 - Pat Morita, the Japanese-American actor in the ''Karate Kid'' movies, died aged 73.

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