Reuters historical calendar - June 28

London, June 27 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on June 28 since 1900: 1902 - The United States bought the concession to build the Panama canal from a French company for 40 million dollars.

1914 - A Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife in Sarajevo. The incident helped to start World War One.

1919 - The end of World War One was marked by the signing of the Treaty of Versailles between Germany and the allies.

1935 - US President Roosevelt ordered a federal gold vault to be built at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

1939 - The first regular transatlantic commercial airplane service began when Pan American Airways' Dixie Clipper left Port Washington, New York, for Marseilles, France.

1948 - The Yugoslav Communist Party was expelled from COMINFORM, the Communist Information Bureau, at a meeting in Bucharest. It marked the formal breach in relations between Yugoslavia and the rest of the Communist bloc.

1950 - North Korean troops captured Seoul in the South.

1981 - In Iran, 74 people, including Chief Justice Ayatollah Beheshti, were killed by a bomb attack on the headquarters of the Islamic Republican Party.

1992 - Burhanuddin Rabbani took office as Afghanistan's president after a guerrilla alliance had ousted the pro-Soviet government.

1996 - President Suleyman Demirel approved Welfare Party leader Necmettin Erbakan as Turkey's first Islamist prime minister in a coalition with the conservative Tansu Ciller.

2001 - The British comedy actress Joan Sims died.

2004 - Iyad Allawi and Ghazi al-Yawar were sworn in as prime minister and president of Iraq as the United States formally handed sovereignty to an interim government in Iraq.

2004 - Anthony Buckeridge, the British author and playwright who created the children's character Jennings, died.

2006 - Montenegro became the 192nd member of the United Nations, a month after it ended its 88-year partnership with Serbia that completed the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.

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