Reuters historical calendar - June 15

London, June 14 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on June 15 since 1900: 1904 - The steamship General Slocum caught fire and sank in New York harbour. Around 1,000 people died, many of them women and children on a church outing.

1919 - The Englishmen John Alcock and Arthur Brown completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight.

1920 - Guglielmo Marconi made the first radio broadcast of live music, featuring the Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba, from Chelmsford, England.

1967 - More than 50,000 fans attended the first rock music festival, in Monterey, California.

1977 - Adolfo Suarez and his Democratic Centre coalition won the first democratic elections in Spain for 41 years.

1978 - Italian President Giovanni Leone was forced to resign over allegations of fiscal mismanagement and possible involvement in the Lockheed bribery scandal.

1988 - Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq decreed that Sharia, the Islamic legal code, would be the supreme law in Pakistan.

1991 - Sikh militants killed 76 passengers, mostly Hindus, on two trains in an attempt to frighten voters into staying at home on election day in the north Indian state of Punjab.

1994 - Israel and the Vatican established full diplomatic ties, sealing a historic accord on mutual recognition and reconciliation after centuries of bitterness between Roman Catholics and Jews.

1996 - Ella Fitzgerald, ''First Lady of Jazz'', died aged 79.

1999 - South Korea sank one North Korean gunboat and heavily damaged others in the first naval clash in the Yellow Sea since the 1950-1953 Korean War.

2001 - The Shanghai Five -- China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan -- welcomed new member Uzbekistan and renamed themselves the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a regional organisation to combat Islamic militancy.

2002 - A federal jury found the accounting firm Andersen guilty of obstructing justice in an investigation of its client, Enron Corp.

2003 - Hume Cronyn, whose career on Broadway and in Hollywood panned more than six decades, died. He was 91. He made his film debut in Alfred Hitchcock's ''Shadow of a Doubt'' in 1943 and went on to appear in such films as ''The Postman Always Rings Twice'', ''12 Angry Men'' and ''Cocoon''.

2004 - The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest US Protestant denomination, voted to cut its links with the Baptist World Alliance over disputes on gay rights.

2005 - Rodrigo Asturias, former Guatemalan guerrilla commander who led armed resistance to military rule in the 1980s, died aged 64.

2006 - Suspected Sri Lankan Tamil Tiger rebels killed 64 people in a mine attack on a civilian bus.

2006 - Serbia recognised Montenegro's independence almost a month after its old partner voted in a referendum to dissolve their joint state.

2006 - The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands -- a coral-fringed swathe of the Pacific -- came under U.S. environmental protection, becoming the world's biggest protected marine reserve.

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