Reuters historical calendar - January 28
Jan 21 (Reuters) - Following are some of the major events to have occurred on January 28 since 1900:
1935 - Iceland became the first country to legalise abortion on medical-social grounds.
1939 - Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats died; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
1945 - A convoy of U.S. trucks from India crossed the Burmese-Chinese border, opening the famous "Burma Road".
1986 - Seven astronauts died when the space shuttle Challenger exploded 72 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral.
1988 - Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs died; information he had obtained helped Moscow to detonate its first nuclear weapon in August 1949.
1997 - At South Africa's Truth Commission, police confessed to the 1977 murder of black civil rights leader Steve Biko.
1998 - Japan's Finance Minister Hiroshi Mitsuzuka was forced to step down because of a bribery case.
2002 - Astrid Lindgren, popular Swedish children's author and creator of Pippi Longstocking, died. She was 94.
2002 - A Boeing 727 belonging to Ecuadorean carrier TAME with 92 passengers and crew on board crashed into Colombia's Cumbal volcano killing all on board.
2003 - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's right-wing Likud party swept to victory in a general election.
2004 - The inquiry by Lord Hutton cleared British Prime Minister Tony Blair of any role in the suicide of Iraq weapons expert, David Kelly, but lambasted the BBC for its report, forcing the chairman of BBC board of governors, Gavyn Davies, to resign.
2004 - The Hague war crimes tribunal convicted ex-rebel Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic of persecuting Croats in a Serb campaign.
2006 - Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, one of the most revered holy men in Israel who taught Kabbalah, a mystical form of Judaism, died.
2007 - The world's oldest person Emma Faust Tillman, a Connecticut woman, died. She was 114.
2008 - Archbishop Christodoulos, the head of Greece's powerful Orthodox Church, who mended ties with the Vatican but clashed with the Greek state, died.
2009 - President Raul Castro began the first visit to Russia by a Cuban leader since the end of the Cold War. The last time a Cuban leader visited Russia was Fidel Castro's trip to Moscow in 1986.
REUTERS
