Reuters historical calendar - February 20

London, Feb 19 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on February 20 since 1900: 1942 - In World War Two, the Japanese invaded Portuguese Timor; Portugal protested to Japan.

1962 - John Glenn became the first US astronaut to orbit the Earth, making a five-hour space voyage aboard the Mercury capsule Friendship VII.

1985 - Predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland legalised the sale of contraceptives.

1990 - Soviet parliamentary leaders proposed a draft law to give republics the right to secede from the Soviet Union.

1996 - Two Iraqi defectors, Lieutenant-General Hussein Kamel Hassan and his brother Saddam Kamel Hassan and their families, crossed back into Iraq six months after fleeing to Jordan. They were pardoned by President Saddam Hussein, their father-in-law, but died in a gun battle on February 23.

2002 - 361 people were killed when an inferno engulfed a packed passenger train heading from Cairo to Luxor in Egypt's worst ever rail disaster.

2005 - US author Hunter S Thompson, who became a counterculture celebrity with works such as ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,'' fatally shot himself at his Colorado home. He was 67.

2006 - Retired Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, a close confidant of popes whose long tenure as head of the Vatican Bank was marked by major financial scandal, mysterious deaths and a criminal probe, died aged 84.

REUTERS SP DS1250