Reuters historical calendar - August 31

LONDON, Aug 30 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on August 31 since 1900: 1907 - The Anglo-Russian Convention was signed in St Petersburg, settling differences between Britain and Russia over Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet.

1920 - The first radio news programme was broadcast by the 8MK station in Detroit, Michigan.

1928 - ''The Threepenny Opera'', written by Bertolt Brecht and set to music by Kurt Weill, had its premiere in Berlin starring Lotte Lenya.

1944 - Russian troops and tanks captured Bucharest from German occupying forces, receiving a huge welcome from the Romanian people.

1962 - Trinidad and Tobago became an independent nation within the Commonwealth.

1969 - Rocky Marciano, the American former world heavyweight boxing champion, was killed in an air crash in Iowa.

1973 - The American film director John Ford died. He was best known for his Westerns including ''Stagecoach'', ''She Wore a Yellow Ribbon'' and ''My Darling Clementine''.

1980 - After two months of strikes, the Polish government agreed to reforms including recognition of the Solidarity trade union.

1986 - A DC-9 airliner and a light plane collided near Los Angeles airport and crashed into the suburbs; 85 people were killed.

1989 - Britain's Princess Anne and her husband, Captain Mark Phillips, separated after 16 years of marriage.

1990 - East and West Germany signed a treaty to harmonise their legal and political systems after merging on Oct. 3.

1991 - Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan declared their independence from the Soviet Union.

1994 - The Irish Republican Army declared an end to its 25-year guerrilla war against British rule of Northern Ireland and switched its struggle for a united Ireland to the conference table.

1994 - Troops of the former Soviet Union ended half a century of military presence on German soil with a farewell ceremony presided over by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

1997 - Britain's Princess Diana and her companion Dodi Al Fayed were killed in a car crash in Paris.

1999 - An Argentine passenger plane crashed on to a road after a failed take-off at Buenos Aires' city airport, killing at least 71 people.

2000 - More than 1,000 world religious and spiritual leaders ended the ''Millennium World Peace Summit'' at the United Nations in New York.

2002 - Lionel Hampton, one of America's jazz legends, died. He pioneered and popularised the vibraphone and teamed up with a long list of jazz greats over a musical career that spanned six decades.

He was 94.

2003 - Kenya lifted a ban on the Mau Mau movement, which spearheaded an uprising against British colonialists in the 1950s.

2004 - The World Trade Organisation (WTO) gave the EU and seven other WTO members the go-ahead for sanctions on the United States in a row over an anti-dumping law, the ''Byrd Amendment''.

2004 - The Republican Party nominated President George W Bush for a second four-year term in the White House.

2005 - About 1,000 Iraqi Shi'ites died in a stampede over a Tigris River bridge in Baghdad, panicked by rumours a suicide bomber was about to blow himself up.

2005 - Polish-born British scientist Joseph Rotblat, who worked on the atomic bomb but went on to win the Nobel peace prize as a leading campaigner against nuclear weapons, died aged 96.

REUTERS SY BD1146