Reuters historical calendar - December 20

London, Dec 19 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on Dec. 20 since 1900: 1945 - Karl Renner was elected first president of the Second Austrian republic.

1954 - The British novelist James Hilton died. His ''Lost Horizon'', ''Goodbye Mr. Chips'' and ''Random Harvest'' were all made into successful films.

1968 - The American novelist John Steinbeck died; he achieved fame in the 1930s with powerful novels about agricultural workers, notably ''The Grapes of Wrath''.

1970 - The Polish Communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka resigned after riots and was replaced by Edward Gierek.

1973 - In Spain, General Franco's prime minister and right-hand man, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, was assassinated as he rode through a Madrid street.

1979 - Kim Jae-kyu, head of the (South) Korean Central Intelligence Agency, was sentenced to death over the assassination of President Park Chung-hee in Seoul.

1981 - Romuald Spasowski, Polish ambassador in Washington, was granted political asylum in the United States.

1982 - The Polish-born American pianist Artur Rubinstein died at 95. One of the century's great pianists, he was at his best as an interpreter of Spanish music and also the music of Chopin.

1987 - A collision between the Philippine ferry Dona Paz and a tanker caused the deaths of 4,386 passengers and crew, the worst peacetime tragedy at sea.

1989 - The United States invaded Panama and installed a new government, but initially failed in its key objective of seizing the country's leader, General Manuel Antonio Noriega.

1990 - Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, a key figure in five years of 'perestroika' reforms that helped to end the Cold War, resigned.

1996 - The U.S. astronomer and author Carl Sagan, who popularised science through books and television and tirelessly championed the search for life in outer space, died aged 62.

1998 - China freed the prominent labour activist Liu Nianchun and sent him and his family into exile in the United States.

1998 - In the United States, Nkem Chukwu gave birth to the world's only known live octuplets. The smallest died on Dec 27.

1998 - Andre Dewavrin, better known under the alias ''Colonel Passy'', the wartime head of the London-based Free French secret service, died.

1999 - The UN tribunal for the former Yugoslavia arrested General Stanislav Galic, commander of the Bosnian Serb unit that laid siege to Sarajevo during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

2001 - Argentine Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo quit after 27 people died in the worst civil unrest in a decade, triggered by the austerity measures he had introduced.

2001 - Leopold Senghor, president of Senegal from 1960-1980, one of Africa's major statesmen and a poet of international repute, died aged 95.

2002 - A Paris court found US billionaire George Soros guilty of using inside information to make money on shares in the bank Societe Generale, fining him 2.2 million euros.

2002 - Pope John Paul formally recognised a miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, speeding the world's most famous nun towards sainthood.

2003 - The Vatican recognised a miracle performed by Charles, the last emperor of Austria, officially setting him on the path to beatification.

2004 - Hungary approved the new European Union constitution in a parliamentary vote, becoming the second member in the 25-nation bloc, after Lithuania, to do so.

REUTERS MS ND1552