Reuters historical calendar January 28

London, Jan 27 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on January 28 since 1900: 1935 - Iceland became the first country to legalise abortion on medical-social grounds.

1939 - William Butler Yeats, Irish poet and dramatist, died; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

1943 - Adolf Hitler mobilised the whole of the German adult population for the country's war effort.

1945 - A convoy of US trucks from India crossed the Burmese-Chinese border, opening the famous ''Burma Road''.

1986 - Seven astronauts died when the space shuttle Challenger exploded 72 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral.

1988 - Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs died; information he had obtained helped Moscow detonate its first nuclear weapon in August 1949.

1997 - At South Africa's Truth Commission, police confessed to the 1977 murder of black civil rights leader Steve Biko.

1998 - Japan's Finance Minister Hiroshi Mitsuzuka was forced to step down because of a bribery case.

2002 - Astrid Lindgren, popular Swedish children's author and creator of Pippi Longstocking, died. She was 94.

2002 - A Boeing 727 belonging to Ecuadorean carrier TAME with 92 passengers and crew on board crashed into Colombia's Cumbal volcano killing all on board.

2003 - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's right-wing Likud party swept to victory in a general election in Israel.

2004 - The inquiry by Lord Hutton cleared British Prime Minister Tony Blair of any role in the suicide of Iraq weapons expert, David Kelly, but lambasted the BBC for its report, forcing the chairman of BBC board of governors, Gavyn Davies, to resign.

2004 - Hague war crimes tribunal convicted ex-rebel Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic of persecuting Croats in a Serb campaign.

2006 - Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, one of the most revered holy men in Israel who taught Kabbalah, a mystical form of Judaism, died.

REUTERS MS KP1216