Reuters historical calendar - July 21

London, July 20 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on July 21 since 1900: 1904 - After 13 years of construction, the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Vladivostok was completed.

1944 - US forces liberated the Pacific island of Guam, held by the Japanese since December 1941.

1960 - Ceylon's Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the world's first woman prime minister, succeeding her assassinated husband Solomon in what is now Sri Lanka.

1967 - Basil Rathbone, the South African-born English actor best known for his film portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, died.

1967 - Albert John Luthuli, former president of the African National Congress and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy of passive resistance to apartheid, died when he was hit by a train.

1969 - The US astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped from the lunar module Eagle to become the first man to walk on the moon.

1973 - France began a series of nuclear tests on the Mururoa Atoll in the pacific.

1974 - Greece accepted a UN resolution on a ceasefire in Cyprus, a day after Turkey invaded the north of the island.

1976 - The British ambassador to Ireland, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, was killed by a bomb placed under his car.

1978 - Juan Pereda Asbun declared himself president of Bolivia after deposing Hugo Banzer in a coup.

1983 - Martial law was lifted in Poland. It had been imposed in December 1981 in a crackdown against the Solidarity trade union movement.

1992 - The first Egyptian-Israeli summit for six years ended in Cairo with Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak agreeing to visit Israel.

1994 - The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn arrived back in Moscow after a two-month trek across Russia following his return from 20 years of exile in the United States.

1998 - Alan Shepard, the first American in space and the only man to play golf on the moon, died aged 74.

2000 - Scientists announced the first direct evidence of the tau neutrino, one of a family of 12 elementary particles and a missing link in the basic building blocks of nature.

2002 - The South Pacific island of Nauru opened diplomatic relations with China before cutting them with its former ally Taiwan.

2002 - The long-distance telephone and data company WorldCom buckled under a 3.85 billion dollars accounting scandal and a mountain of junk-rated debt, filing for bankruptcy protection in the largest ever US insolvency.

2003 - Jack Davis, Britain's oldest veteran of World War One who fought in the trenches with the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry during the 1914-1918 conflict, died aged 108.

2005 - China bowed to two years of political and market pressure by revaluing its currency yuan by 2.1 per cent and abandoning a decade-old peg against the US dollar.

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