Today in History: Pope John Paul I died after only 33 days in office

The following are some of the major events to have occurred on September 28:

1902 – The French novelist Emile Zola died.

1939 – Warsaw, Poland surrenders to Germans after weeks of resistance.

1964 – Arthur “Harpo” Marx died. He played a mute in the Marx Brothers films, using a taxi horn to communicate.

1970 – The Egyptian statesman Gamal Abdel Nasser died. He staged a coup against the monarchy in 1952, named himself prime minister two years later and was elected president in 1956.

1972 – Team Canada ice hockey players score winning goal in series against Team USSR.

1978 – Pope John Paul I died after only 33 days in office. He was succeeded by John Paul II.

1978 – P.W. Botha was elected prime minister of South Africa.

1994 – In Europe’s worst peacetime maritime disaster, 852 people drowned when the ferry Estonia sank about 20 miles from the Finnish island of Utoe, en route from Tallinn to Stockholm.

1995 – Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat signed an accord at White House ceremonies establishing Palestinian self-rule in most of the West Bank.

2000 – Former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who led the country for 16 years, died in Montreal at the age of 80.

2003 – Althea Gibson, the first black tennis player to win the Wimbledon and U.S. national championships, died aged 76.

(Reuters)