Reuters historical calendar - December 8

London, Dec 7 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on December 8 in history.

1907 - Oscar II, King of Sweden (1872-1907) and Norway (1872-1905), died and was succeeded by his son Gustav V.

1940 - German bombers staged a heavy overnight raid on London, causing the first serious war damage to the House of Commons and Tower of London.

1941 - The United States and Britain declared war on Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor the previous day.

1941 - The Nazis opened an extermination camp at Chelmno near Lodz in occupied Poland - the first camp designed specifically for the mass killing of human beings.

1949 - Chinese Nationalists fled the Chinese mainland, moving their capital to Formosa (Taiwan).

1949 - Jule Styne's musical comedy ''Gentlemen Prefer Blondes'' premiered on the New York stage.

1966 - The United States and Soviet Union were among 28 countries to agree to ban nuclear weapons in space.

1966 - The Greek ferry Heraklion sank in a storm with the loss of over 200 lives.

1974 - The Greeks, in a referendum, voted by a huge majority against restoring the monarchy.

1978 - Golda Meir, Israel's first woman prime minister (1969-74), died.

1980 - John Lennon, former member of ''The Beatles'', was shot dead in New York by Mark David Chapman.

1987 - U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed a treaty to eliminate all their intermediate-range and shorter-range nuclear missiles.

1989 - East Germany opened a corruption probe against former Communist Party chief Erich Honecker and five other disgraced former leaders.

1991 - Leaders of Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine formed the Commonwealth of Independent States.

1995 - China enthroned a new six-year-old Panchen Lama, pressing Tibetans to accept its controversial choice for Tibetan Buddhism's second-ranking monk over one named by the exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama.

1995 - The Kremlin signed an accord with the Chechen government giving the region special status while staying an integral part of Russia.

1999 - A U.S. lawsuit charged that Japanese companies profited from the misery of forced labourers during World War Two.

1999 - A Tennessee jury found that the 1968 assassination of U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King was the result of a conspiracy, not the act of a lone gunman.

2000 - A gunman fired at random in a mosque in Khartoum, killing at least 20 worshippers. Abbas Baqir Abbas, a member of a Muslim sect, was shot by police.

2000 - Lebanon and Iraq agreed to re-open their oil pipeline via Syria, which had been shut for 20 years.

2002 - Keith Tyson, who found fame with a Kentucky Fried Chicken menu encased in lead, won the 2002 Turner Prize with his version of Rodin's ''The Thinker''.

2003 - Cuban pianist Ruben Gonzalez, who gained fame playing for the Buena Vista Social Club, died at 84.

2004 - The South American Community of Nations, a regional integration pact, was launched in Peru, but only half the future bloc's 12 presidents turned up to sign it.

**2005 - Norway adopted a law requiring large Norwegian companies to ensure that by 2008 at least 40 percent of board members were women or face possible closure, the first legislation of its kind in the world.

REUTERS PB RK1030