Reuters historical calendar - May 1

LONDON, Apr 30 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on May 1 in history: 1904 -The Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, noted for his Ninth Symphony, ''From the New World'', died.

1931 - The 102-storey Empire State Building in New York, at the time the world's tallest building, was officially opened.

1937 - The Spanish painter Pablo Picasso produced the first sketch of his masterpiece ''Guernica'', five days after the Basque town had been bombed by the Germans in the Spanish Civil War.

1945 - Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels committed suicide in his Berlin bunker.

1960 - The Soviet Union shot down an American U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers. He was jailed for spying before being exchanged in an East-West spy swap in February 1962.

1967 - Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu in Las Vegas.

1978 - The Japanese explorer Naomi Uemura became the first man to reach the North Pole alone.

1990 - Chinese troops began withdrawing from the Tibetan capital of Lhasa as martial law was lifted.

1993 - Former French Socialist prime minister Pierre Beregovoy died after shooting himself.

1993 - Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa died of injuries sustained in a bomb blast during a May Day procession.

1994 - The Brazilian Ayrton Senna, three times world Formula 1 motor racing champion, died after a high-speed crash in the San Marino Grand Prix.

1999 - The body of the British mountaineer George Mallory was found on Mount Everest, almost 75 years after he disappeared on a climbing expedition.

2001 - US President George W Bush called for the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Moscow to be replaced to make way for the United States' new missile defence plan.

2002 - The Netherlands became the first country to permit euthanasia or mercy killing as a new law came into force.

2003 - US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the bulk of Afghanistan was secure and US-led forces had moved from major combat operations to a period of stabilisation and reconstruction.

2004 - The flags of 10 new members of the European Union were ceremonially raised in Brussels to mark the bloc's historic expansion to the east.

2006 - President Evo Morales ordered the military to occupy Bolivia's natural gas fields after nationalising the industry and threatening to expel foreign companies that did not recognise state control.

REUTERS SZ PM1052