Reuters historical calendar - August 25

Aug 18 (Reuters) - Following are some of the major events to have occurred on Aug. 25 since 1900:

1936 - Sixteen opponents of Soviet leader Josef Stalin were executed after a show trial.

1940 - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were incorporated into the Soviet Union.

1940 - British aircraft dropped their first bombs on Berlin in an overnight raid in World War Two.

1942 - The Duke of Kent, youngest brother of Britain's King George VI, was killed in an air crash on a wartime mission to Iceland.

1944 - Paris was liberated when the local German commander surrendered to the allies.

1964 - Kenneth Kaunda became president-designate of Zambia, formerly the British colony of Northern Rhodesia.

1978 - The Turin Shroud, venerated by many as the burial cloth of Christ, went on public display for the first time in 45 years.

1988 - Direct talks between Iran and Iraq began in an attempt to end their eight-year-old war.

1989 - After a 12-year journey, the U.S. spacecraft Voyager 2 flew over the planet Neptune and its moon Triton, sending back photographs of swampy areas, frozen lakes and craters.

1991 - Belarus declared independence from the Soviet Union.

1997 - Egon Krenz, East Germany's last hardline Communist leader, was sentenced to six and a half years in jail for the deaths of citizens killed while fleeing over the Berlin Wall.

2000 - Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe gave formal notice that the government would appropriate 509 white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks.

2003 - Twin car bombs in India's financial capital Bombay killed 51 people and injured at least 150.

2004 - South African police arrested Mark Thatcher, the son of Margaret Thatcher, on suspicion of involvement in a coup plot in Equatorial Guinea. Thatcher later pleaded guilty and avoided jail in a deal with prosecutors.

2007 - Former French prime minister Raymond Barre, an economist who helped set Europe on its road to a single currency, died aged 83.

REUTERS