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Reuters historical calendar - February 15

LONDON, Feb 8 (Reuters) - Following are some of the major

events to have occurred on February 15 in history:

1368 - Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor 1433-37, born. He was

also king of Hungary, Germany, Lombard and Bohemia.

1564 - Galileo, Italian mathematician, astronomer and

physicist, born. He developed the astronomical telescope with

which he discovered craters on the moon and the satellites of

Jupiter.

1637 - Emperor Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, archduke of

Austria and king of Bohemia and Hungary, died.

1710 - Louis XV, king of France from 1715 to 1774, born. He

became king at the age of five.

1763 - The Treaty of Hubertusburg was signed, ending

hostilities between Austria and Prussia in the Seven Years' War.

Prussia retained Silesia and emerged as a great military power.

1857 - Mikhail Glinka, Russian composer best known for his

opera "Ruslan and Lyudmila", died.

1898 - The Spanish-American war began after the battleship

U.S.S. Maine, travelling to Havana on a goodwill mission, struck

a mine and blew up.

1922 - The Permanent Court of International Justice, sitting

at the Hague in the Netherlands, held its first session.

1928 - Herbert Henry Asquith, Liberal British prime minister

1908-1916, died. He was responsible for the Parliament Act of

1911 which limited the power of the House of Lords.

1933 - Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian-born anarchist, failed

in his attempt to assassinate U.S. President Franklin D.

Roosevelt in Miami.

1938 - In the Spanish Civil War, Franco's forces captured

Teruel.

1942 - In Singapore a British-led allied force of some

85,000 troops, bombarded and cut off from support and supplies

after a week-long battle, surrendered to a Japanese invading

force less than half its size.

1944 - The monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy was bombed by

allied aircraft.

1964 - Britain and Cyprus referred the Cyprus dispute to the

U.N. Security Council.

1965 - Nat King Cole, U.S. popular singer and jazz pianist,

died.

1965 - Canada adopted the Red Maple Leaf as its new national

flag.

1970 - Lord Dowding, British Air Chief Marshal and chief of

Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, died.

1971 - Britain changed over to decimal currency from pounds,

shillings and pence.

1984 - British pop singer Elton John married Renata Blauel

in Sydney, Australia.

1984 - Ethel Merman, U.S. actress and singer, died. She

starred in such Broadway musicals as "Annie Get Your Gun" and

"Call Me Madam".

1989 - 100,000 Soviet troops left Afghanistan under a

U.N.-brokered accord 10 years after Moscow had sent troops to

help a Marxist government in Kabul.

1990 - Britain and Argentina restored full diplomatic ties,

affirming reconciliation after their 1982 war for the Falkland

Islands.

1992 - Two Spaniards completed the first east-west balloon

flight across the Atlantic when they arrived in Venezuela from

Spain.

1993 - The Slovak parliament elected economist Michal Kovac

as newly-independent Slovakia's first president.

1994 - Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, the "Rostov

Ripper", who raped and butchered more than 50 victims, was

executed after losing an 11th-hour appeal for clemency.

1996 - An ammunition dump at the Afghan presidential palace

in Kabul blew up, killing at least 60 people.

1997 - North Korean defector Li Il-nam, a relative of Kim

Jong-il's ex wife, was shot by suspected North Korean agents,

dying ten days later.

1999 - Henry Kendall, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and a

pioneer of the environmental movement among scientists, died

aged 72.