Reuters historical calendar - September 4
London, Sep 3 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on September 4 since 1900: 1907 - The Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg died in Bergen.
1909 - The world's first Boy Scout rally was held at Crystal Palace, London.
1940 - Ion Antonescu was appointed Romanian prime minister; he was executed in 1946 for war crimes.
1944 - British and Canadian troops liberated Brussels and Antwerp from German forces in World War Two.
1948 - Wilhelmina, queen of the Netherlands from 1890, abdicated in favour of her daughter Juliana.
1957 - Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus ordered National Guard troops to turn away nine black students trying to enter the whites-only Central High School in Little Rock.
1965 - The Franco-German theologian, philosopher and organist Albert Schweitzer died in Gabon, where he had set up a hospital in 1913. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for efforts on behalf of the ''Brotherhood of Nations''.
1972 - US swimmer Mark Spitz won his seventh Olympic gold medal, a record for a single Olympiad.
1974 - East Germany and the United States established formal diplomatic relations.
1975 - Egypt and Israel signed an agreement in Geneva providing for Israeli withdrawal from Sinai and establishment of a new UN buffer zone.
1989 - Georges Simenon, Belgian creator of the fictional detective character Inspector Maigret, died.
1992 - Bulgaria's former communist leader Todor Zhivkov, deposed in 1989, was sentenced to seven years in prison after being found guilty of embezzling state funds.
1995 - The Fourth World Conference on Women, the biggest UN gathering in history, began in China's Great Hall of the People with a UN declaration that sexual equality was the last great project of the 20th century.
1997 - The controversial psychologist and IQ pioneer Hans Eysenck died.
1998 - The UN tribunal on Rwanda sentenced former prime minister Jean Kambanda to life imprisonment for his role in the 1994 genocide.
2000 - Truck owners blockaded petrol depots and refineries across France in protest against high fuel prices.
2002 - Afghanistan announced a redenomination of its currency, the Afghani, removing three zeroes.
2002 - The Polish-born French pianist Vlado Perlemuter died aged 98. Perlemuter studied with the French composers Maurice Ravel and Gabriel Faure and was a noted interpreter of their music.
**2006 - Steve Irwin, the quirky Australian naturalist who won worldwide acclaim, was killed by a stingray barb through the chest while diving off Australia's northeast coast. He was 44.
Reuters
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