Reuters historical calendar - June 23

LONDON, June 22 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on June 23 since 1900: 1945 - Japanese commander Lieutenant-General Ushijima committed suicide at Okinawa, site of the bloodiest battle of the Pacific theatre of World War Two.

1956 - Gamal Abdel Nasser was elected president of Egypt.

1959 - Klaus Fuchs, a German Communist spy and naturalised Briton, was released from prison in England after serving nine years of a 14-year sentence for passing atomic secrets to Russia.

1960 - Patrice Lumumba became the first prime minister of the newly independent Republic of the Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

1967 - Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, reaffirming the Roman Catholic Church's traditional law on priestly celibacy.

1971 - The European Economic Community concluded negotiations for Britain's entry.

1978 - Renato Curcio, the leader of the Italian Red Brigade urban guerrillas, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

1980 - Sanjay Gandhi, younger son of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was killed when the plane he was piloting crashed.

1983 - The US Supreme Court ruled that the US Congress could not veto presidential decisions.

1985 - An Air India Boeing 747 on a flight from Canada crashed into the sea over 100 miles off the coast of Ireland; all 329 passengers and crew were killed.

1994 - After decades as an international outcast, South Africa reclaimed its seat in the UN General Assembly.

1995 - Jonas Salk, the medical pioneer who developed the first vaccine against polio, died.

1996 - Andreas Papandreou, Greece's former socialist prime minister, died after a long illness.

1998 - The Irish-born actress Maureen O'Sullivan, who had a lengthy career in films and on the stage, died. She is best known for a string of ''Tarzan'' films starring Johnny Weissmuller.

2001 - The fugitive Peruvian spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos, Latin America's most wanted man, was captured in Venezuela.

2002 - An earthquake measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale struck around Moquegua, in southern Peru, 856 miles (1,369 km) south of Lima, killing at least 97 people and leaving more than 46,000 homeless.

2004 - The International Criminal Court opened its first investigation into crimes allegedly committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, including rape, torture and the use of child soldiers.

2005 - Former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was sentenced to 60 years in prison for orchestrating the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers who were registering black voters in Mississippi.

2006 - Television producer Aaron Spelling, whose shows such as ''Beverly Hills 90210'' and ''Dynasty'' helped shape US prime-time television, died. He was 83.

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