Reuters historical calendar - May 10

London, May 9 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on May 10 since 1900: 1904 - Sir Henry Morton Stanley, British-born journalist and African explorer, died. He was famous for finding the Scottish missionary explorer David Livingstone in 1871.

1925 - William Ferguson Massey, New Zealand statesman and prime minister (1912-25), died in office.

1933 - Nazis, nationalist students and professors in black robes gathered on a square in central Berlin to burn books by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht and other authors condemned by Adolf Hitler's followers as ''un-German''.

1940 - Winston Churchill took over as British prime minister following the resignation of Neville Chamberlain.

1940 - Germany invaded Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium.

1941 - Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, flew from Augsburg and parachuted down near Glasgow, Scotland, in an apparent attempt to negotiate a peace deal. He was arrested and imprisoned.

1960 - The US nuclear-powered submarine Triton completed an 84-day, 41,000-mile submerged voyage around the world.

1963 - Pope John XXIII received the Balzan Peace Prize, the first peace prize ever awarded to a pope.

1977 - American actress Joan Crawford died. Born Lucille LeSueur, she won an Oscar in 1945 for her role in the film ''Mildred Pierce''.

1981 - In West Germany, the Social Democrats lost elections in West Berlin for the first time since World War Two.

1993 - Over 200 workers were killed when a fire destroyed a Thai toy factory in Nakhon Pathom province.

1994 - Nelson Mandela was sworn in as South Africa's first black president.

1994 - Media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi took office as Italy's prime minister at the head of a government that brought neo-fascists to power for the first time since 1945.

1995 - Britain lifted a 23-year ban on ministerial talks with Sinn Fein, the political ally of the Irish Republican Army guerrillas in Northern Ireland.

1997 - 1,560 people were killed and 2,810 injured when an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale rocked rural areas of eastern Iran.

1999 - Brazil formally granted political asylum to Paraguay's disgraced former president Raul Cubas and his family.

2002 - A federal judge sentenced former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, considered one of the most damaging spies in US history, to life in prison for selling secrets to Moscow.

2002 - Yves Robert, French actor-director, died. Among his notable achievements included the films ''The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe'', ''La guerre des boutons'' (War of the Buttons) and Arsene Lupin. He was 81.

2004 - Biotech crop pioneer Monsanto Co suspended plans to introduce what would be the world's first biotech wheat, bowing to a storm of protest over genetically modified crops.

2005 - Germany unveiled a new memorial in Berlin for the six million Jewish victims of Nazi terror.

2006 - Colombian-born singer and songwriter Soraya, one of the first artists to write and record in both English and Spanish, died after a battle with breast cancer. She was 37.

2006 - AM Rosenthal, a former executive editor of the New York Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, died. He was 84.

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