Reuters historical calendar - January 4

London, Jan 3 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on January 4 since 1900: 1908 - Mulai Hafid was proclaimed Sultan of Morocco at Fez.

1923 - Dying Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin dictated a postscript to a letter that has become known as his political ''testament'' in which he suggested Stalin was too rude to be general secretary of the Communist party and should be replaced.

1948 - The British governor of Burma formerly handed over power and the Union of Burma was proclaimed an independent republic with U Thakin Nu as its first prime minister.

1958 - Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite launched in October 1957 by the Soviet Union, disintegrated and fell to earth.

1960 - Albert Camus, Algerian-born French existentialist writer, died in a car accident. His work included the novels ''L'Etranger'' (The Outsider) and ''La Peste'' (The Plague).

1964 - Pope Paul VI began a visit to the Holy Land, which included the first visit by a pope to Jerusalem.

1965 - T S Eliot, American-born English poet, playwright and Nobel Prize winner, died. He wrote ''The Waste Land'', ''Murder in the Cathedral'', and ''Four Quartets''.

1967 - Donald Campbell, British car and speedboat racer, was killed on Coniston Water in England during an attempt to break the world water speed record.

1978 - Said Hammami, the Palestine Liberation Organisation's representative in Britain, was assassinated in London.

1995 - Newt Gingrich was formally elected speaker of the US House of Representatives, the first Republican in the post in 40 years.

2000 - Former Ivory Coast President Henri Konan Bedie arrived in Paris to take up residence after being overthrown in a Christmas Eve coup.

2002 - The world's oldest man, 112-year-old Antonio Todde who swore the secret of his longevity was a daily glass of red wine, died on the Italian island of Sardinia. In a bizarre twist of fate, Italy's oldest woman, 110-year-old Maria Grazia Broccolo, died only hours later in a small town south of Rome.

2003 - The Raelians, a UFO cult that believes aliens landed on Earth 25,000 years ago and started the human race through cloning, said a cloned baby was born to a Dutch woman. Cloning experts however swiftly dismissed the claim as a baseless stunt.

2004 - Rival Afghan factions attending the Loya Jirga agreed on a national constitution, paving the way for the first free elections after nearly a quarter-century of war.

REUTERS SP DS1045