Reuters historical calendar - March 14

London, Mar 13 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on March 14 since 1900: 1932 - George Eastman, American photographic pioneer who founded the Kodak company, committed suicide.

1938 - Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Bolshevik, was executed after being found guilty of counter-revolutionary activities and espionage in one of the most famous Soviet show trials of the 1930s.

1945 - The heaviest bomb of World War Two, the 22,000-pound ''Grand Slam'', was dropped by the British Dambuster Squadron on the Bielefeld railway viaduct in Germany.

1953 - Klement Gottwald, Stalinist president of Czechoslovakia from 1948-53, died.

1964 - Jack Ruby was found guilty of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

1991 - The ''Birmingham Six'', Irishmen wrongly convicted of the 1974 bombing of pubs in Birmingham, England, by Irish republican guerrillas, were freed after 16 years in jail.

1997 - Academy Award-winning director Fred Zinnemann, whose classic films included ''High Noon'', ''From Here to Eternity'' and ''A Man for All Seasons'', died aged 89.

2002 - Libyan Abdel Basset al-Megrahi lost his appeal in a Scottish court against his murder conviction for the 1988 mid-air bombing of a Pan Am airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

2004 - Spaniards voted out the centre-right government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar in a spectacular election upset triggered by the bombing of trains in Madrid a few days earlier, claimed by militants acting in the name of al Qaeda.

2005 - China passed a law granting itself the right to attack Taiwan if it moved towards formal independence, drawing protests from the island.

2006 - Lennart-Georg Meri, Estonia's first president after independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, died aged 86. He helped steer the Baltic state out of the Soviet Union towards membership of the European Union and NATO.

REUTERS SB KP1030