Reuters historical calendar - May 22

London, May 21 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on May 22 since 1900: 1908 - The Wright Brothers patented their flying machine in the United States.

1915 - The worst train disaster in Britain took place when a troop train collided with a passenger train at Gretna Green, Scotland, killing 227.

1939 - The ''Pact of Steel'' was signed between Hitler and Mussolini, committing Germany and Italy to support each other in time of war.

1943 - The Third Communist International, known as the Comintern, was dissolved by the Soviet Union in a gesture to the West.

1967 - A fire at the Brussels department store ''L'Innovation'' killed over 320 people.

1968 - The US nuclear-powered submarine Scorpion sank 400 miles south of the Azores, the first warship to sink with nuclear weapons aboard.

1969 - The Apollo 10 lunar module Snoopy came within 9.4 miles of the moon's surface.

1972 - President Richard Nixon became the first US president to visit Moscow.

1972 - Ceylon became a republic within the Commonwealth of former British colonies under the name of Sri Lanka.

1979 - The 11-year premiership of Pierre Trudeau in Canada ended when the Liberal Party was defeated in a general election by the Progressive Conservative Party.

1981 - Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, was jailed for life in Britain after being convicted on 13 counts of murder.

1989 - India test-fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile, igniting worries over nuclear proliferation and a spiralling arms race on the subcontinent.

1990 - Formerly Marxist South Yemen and conservative North Yemen merged into one state.

1996 - Japan settled lawsuits to bring to an end the Minamata mercury poisoning case, named after a village where hundreds died between 1953 and 1960 from eating seafood tainted with mercury.

1998 - Northern Ireland's voters resoundingly approved a landmark peace agreement designed to end 30 years of Protestant-Catholic bloodshed. Almost 95 percent of voters in the Irish Republic simultaneously approved related changes to their own constitution.

2001 - France's National Assembly approved a controversial bill to give more powers to the island of Corsica, where separatists had protested against Paris for over 20 years.

2002 - Former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry was found guilty of killing four black girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963.

2003 - The UN Security Council voted 14-0 to adopt a US-led resolution ending sanctions on Iraq after 13 years.

2004 - Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il agreed on a package under which all relatives of Japanese abductees could leave North Korea and Japan would in turn provide humanitarian aid.

2005 - Chinese mountaineers and researchers climbed to the top of Mount Everest and set up radar and Global Positioning System instruments to determine whether the world's tallest mountain was still growing.

2006 - Montenegro ended nearly a century of formal ties to Serbia after its people voted for independence in a referendum.

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