Reuters historical calendar - August 3

london, Aug 2 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on August 3 since 1900.

1904 - British troops entered Lhasa, Tibet, as the Dalai Lama fled.

1914 - Germany declared war on France.

1916 - Sir Roger Casement, Irish nationalist leader, was hanged in London for treason.

1924 - Joseph Conrad, Polish-born novelist and author of ''Lord Jim'', died.

1936 - Jesse Owens, black American athlete, won the first of his four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics infuriating the host, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

1940 - Lithuania was formally incorporated into the Soviet Union as the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.

1943 - The bombing of Hamburg during World War Two caused the first big wartime firestorm and more than 30,000 people died.

1945 - All ethnic Germans and Hungarians in Czechoslovakia were stripped of their citizenship.

1954 - Colette, one of the most influential French novelists of the 20th century, died.

1958 - The US atomic submarine Nautilus, commanded by William Anderson, became the first vessel to reach the North Pole under the ice.

1966 - Lenny Bruce, US comedian, died from a drugs overdose.

1977 - Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus died of a heart attack in Nicosia.

1988 - West German Mathias Rust, who landed his light plane near Moscow's Red Square in 1987, was released from prison and expelled from the Soviet Union.

1995 - Ida Lupino, British-born actress and director, who once described herself as ''the poor man's Bette Davis'', died.

1998 - Alfred Schnittke, one of the most original and influential composers to emerge from the Soviet Union, died.

2000 - The Indonesian attorney-general's office formally charged ex-President Suharto with corruption.

2001 - Thailand's Constitutional Court cleared Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of charges he deliberately concealed assets, allowing him to carry on in the job.

2002 - Turkey's parliament abolished the death penalty in peacetime as part of major reforms to prepare the country for European Union membership.

2004 - A US satellite headed off to Mercury, one of the hottest planets in the solar system, with NASA scientists expecting to find ice.

2004 - The Statue of Liberty reopened to visitors for the first time since the 9/11 attacks following security and safety improvements paid for by more than million in donations.

**2005 - The army in Mauritania said it had seized power to end the ''totalitarian'' regime of President Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya.

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