Reuters historical calendar - June 5

London, June 4 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on June 5 since 1900: 1900 - British troops captured Pretoria in the Boer War.

1916 - Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener of Khartoum, Irish soldier, statesman and conqueror of Sudan, was lost at sea when his ship struck a mine off the Orkneys.

1945 - The Allied Control Commission took control of Germany, dividing it into four occupation zones.

1947 - US Secretary of State George Marshall announced his plan to help Europe recover financially from the effects of World War Two.

1953 - King Frederick signed a new Danish constitution into effect; Greenland and the Faroes became integral parts of Denmark.

1967 - The Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbours Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon began.

1968 - US Senator Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles by Palestinian-Arab Sirhan Sirhan. He died the next day.

1975 - The Suez Canal, closed in the 1967 Middle East war, reopened to all but Israeli shipping.

1988 - Solo yachtswoman Kay Cottee sailed into Sydney Harbour to become the first woman to circle the globe alone.

1989 - President George Bush suspended US government sales and private military exports to China in protest over the Chinese army's crackdown on the Beijing student uprising.

1991 - President Chadli Benjedid declared a state of siege in Algeria, sacked the government and cancelled the country's first multi-party general election after days of protest by Islamic fundamentalists.

1993 - Twenty-three Pakistani troops serving with the UN in Somalia were killed in an ambush.

1999 - US jazz singer Mel Torme died at age 73.

2000 - US President Bill Clinton became the first major Western leader to address the Russian State Duma.

2002 - Sinn Fein, the IRA's political ally, took the symbolic top job in Belfast when a hardline republican won the post of lord mayor in the face of bitter Protestant opposition.

2003 - Pope John Paul arrived on the Adriatic island of Krk to begin the 100th foreign trip of his papacy, a five-day visit to Croatia.

2003 - Making his final report to the United Nations Security Council before retiring, Chief UN inspector Hans Blix said he had not found Iraq had resumed its weapons of mass destruction programmes although this did not mean such items did not exist.

2004 - Ronald Reagan, US president from 1981-89, died of Alzheimer's disease. As the 40th US president, he is credited with helping end the Cold War with the former Soviet Union. He was 93.

2005 - Switzerland voted by a narrow margin to join the European Union's passport-free ''Schengen'' zone, bringing the fiercely independent nation a step closer to its European neighbours.

**2006 - Paraguayan former President Luis Gonzalez Macchi was sentenced to six years in prison for setting up a scheme to embezzle 16 million dollars of state funds.

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