Reuters historical calendar - May 5

LONDON, May 4 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on May 5 in history: 1930 - Mahatma Gandhi was arrested by the British in India over his mass campaign of disobedience.

1936 - Italian troops took Addis Ababa.

1945 - American poet Ezra Pound was arrested in Italy for treason.

1955 - The Federal Republic of (West) Germany became a sovereign state after Allied High Commissioners met to abolish their controlling body set up after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.

West Germany also joined NATO on this day.

1980 - British elite SAS troops stormed the Iranian embassy in London, killing four of the five gunmen who had taken over the building and seized hostages.

1993 - Irving Howe, US writer and intellectual, died. He is best known for ''World of Our Fathers'', a study of east European Jewish immigrants in the United States.

1999 - Indonesia and Portugal signed an agreement leading to independence for the territory of East Timor.

2002 - Jacques Chirac won 82 per cent of the vote in the second round of French presidential elections, crushing far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen with the largest vote in France's 44-year history.

2003 - Walter Sisulu, a veteran of the struggle against white minority rule in South Africa and long-time friend and mentor to Nelson Mandela, died aged 90.

2004 - Picasso's ''Boy With the Pipe'' set a new world record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction when it fetched 104,168,000 dollar at Sotheby's in New York.

**2006 - Naushad Ali, one of Bollywood's most loved composers and the first to use Indian classical music in Hindi films, died aged 87.

REUTERS AM PM1107