Reuters historical calendar - September 29

London, Sep 28 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on September 29 since 1900: 1918 - Bulgaria signed an armistice with the Allies in World War One.

1923 - Britain began to govern Palestine under a mandate from the League of Nations.

1938 - Germany, France, Britain and Italy signed the Munich agreement, in which the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, was surrendered to Nazi Germany.

1941 - Over two days, German occupiers killed 33,771 Jewish men, women and children in the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev.

1950 - General Douglas MacArthur handed over Seoul to President Syngman Rhee of South Korea.

1957 - Many people were killed in the first nuclear waste disaster to cause large loss of life. An explosion at the Mayak Chemical Combine near Lake Kystym in Russia formed a nuclear cloud eight km wide.

1960 - Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev heckled and thumped his desk during British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's speech to the UN Assembly in New York.

1970 - Vice-President Anwar Sadat was sworn in as acting president of Egypt after the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser the previous day.

1972 - China and Japan agreed to establish diplomatic relations.

1979 - Pope John Paul II began the first papal visit to Ireland.

1979 - President Francisco Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, who had been overthrown in a military coup in August, was executed for ''genocide, treason, embezzlement and systematic violation of human rights''.

1988 - The NASA shuttle Discovery was launched in the first shuttle mission since the explosion of Challenger in 1986.

1990 - US Secretary of State James Baker met Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach in the highest-level contact between the former enemies since the Vietnam war.

1999 - President Bill Clinton directed his administration to make it possible to forgive all the debt owed to the United States by the world's poorest countries.

2001 - Nguyen Van Thieu, the penultimate president of South Vietnam, who led his nation until just days before it fell to North Vietnam, died aged 78.

2002 - Afghan athletes returned to top international competition for the first time in eight years as the 14th Asian Games opened in Pusan, South Korea.

2004 - Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei signed a new constitution that paved the way for the oil-rich kingdom's first election since 1962.

2006 - A Boeing 737-800 belonging to low-cost Brazilian airline Gol crashed over the Amazon jungle in remote Mato Grosso state killing all 155 aboard.

REUTERS SG RK0945