On this day
02aug04

1993 – Serb gunners sink part of a vital bridge severing the only land link between the southern Dalmatian coast and the rest ofCroatia.

1100 – King William II of England, son of William the Conqueror, is killed by an arrow while hunting in the New Forest.
1552 – The Treaty of Passau gives religious freedom to Lutherans in Germany.
1589 – France's King Henry III is assassinated at St Cloud by Jacques Clement, a Jacobin monk.
1718 – Quadruple Alliance is formed by Britain, the Netherlands, France and the Holy Roman Empire against an aggressive policy pursued by Spain.
1788 – Death of Thomas Gainsborough, English portrait and landscape artist.
1802 – Napoleon Bonaparte of France is declared Consul for Life, giving him power to name his successor.
1830 – France's King Charles X abdicates after three days of an uprising in Paris.
1858 – British Parliament passes the India Bill, transferring the government of India to the Crown from the East India Company.
1865 – Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is published in England.
1876 – Wild Bill Hickok, US marshal and one of the most colourful figures of the Wild West, is killed in a saloon.
1903 – Macedonians take arms to free themselves from Turkish rule. The rebellion is crushed in 11 days.
1914 – Germany occupies Luxembourg and sends an ultimatum to Belgium to allow passage of its troops across its territory.
1921 – Death of Enrico Caruso, Italian operatic tenor.
1922 – Death of Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish inventor of the telephone in 1876.
1923 – Death of Warren G Harding, 29th US president on his return to San Francisco from a trip to Alaska.
1928 – Italy signs 20-year treaty of friendship with Ethiopia.
1934 – Germany's President Paul von Hindenburg dies aged 87, opening way for Adolf Hitler to become dictator.
1935 – Britain passes Government of India Act, which reforms governmental system, separates Burma and Aden from India, grants provincial governments, greater self-government and creates central legislature in New Delhi.
1936 – Death of Louis Bleriot, French aviator and the first to fly the English Channel.
1939 – Albert Einstein, concerned that Nazis are working on powerful bombs using uranium, writes to US President Roosevelt urging him to start an atomic project.
1940 – Hermann Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe, gives the Eagle Day directive to destroy British air power to pave the way for an invasion of Britain.
1943 – US Navy patrol torpedo boat, PT-109, commanded by Lieutenant John F Kennedy, sinks after being sheared in two by a Japanese destroyer off the Solomon Islands; Kennedy was credited with saving members of the crew.
1944 – Joseph P Kennedy, US navy pilot and elder brother of John F Kennedy, is killed when his plane explodes over the Belgian coast.
1945 – Potsdam conference ends with Truman, Stalin and Attlee in agreement on the demilitarisation and division of Germany.
1956 – Britain rejects request of Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland for status as separate state within British Commonwealth.
1963 – United States tells United Nations it will halt all sales of military equipment to South Africa because of apartheid.
1964 – US reports the first of two attacks on its destroyers by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin.
1970 – British army uses rubber bullets for the first time to quell a riot in Northern Ireland.
1971 – United States says it will support seating China in United Nations but will oppose expulsion of Chinese Nationalists.
1980 – Terrorist bomb attack on railway station at Bologna, Italy, kills 85 people.
1982 – Daily Sun first published in Brisbane.
1985 – A Delta Airlines Tristar airliner crashes on its final approach to Dallas-Fort Worth airport, killing 133 people.
1988 – Soviet military unveils its new top-secret Blackjack bomber to US Defence Secretary Frank Carlucci.
1989 – Trade restrictions between Britain and Argentina are lifted for the first time since the 1982 Falklands war.
1990 – Iraqi tanks and infantry overrun Kuwait in predawn strike after dispute over oil and frontier.
1992 – Security forces arrest 50 armed Islamic extremists and seize an arms cache containing 130 bombs in Algiers.
1993 – Serb gunners sink part of a vital bridge severing the only land link between the southern Dalmation coast and the rest of Croatia.
1994 – Eleven people die in explosion at Porgera mine in Papua New Guinea.
1995 – Death of Labor politician Fred Daly, 83, last surviving member of Australia's Curtin government; King Fahd replaces his oil and finance ministers in Saudi Arabia's most significant leadership shake-up since he came to power in 1982.
1996 – In Atlanta, American Michael Johnson becomes the first athlete to win both the 200 and 400 metre races at the same Olympic games.
1997 – Former warlord Charles Taylor is sworn in as Liberia's president, marking the completion of a transition from seven years of civil war; Death aged 83 of US beat generation writer William S Burroughs; Typhoon Victor injures 32 people in Hong Kong.
1998 – Afghanistan's Taliban fighters capture the stronghold of warlord Rashid Dostum, putting the religious militia on the doorstep of the opposition's headquarters.
1999 – In India 285 people die when two trains crash head-on in the predawn darkness near Gaisal, about 500 km north of Calcutta. Some 300 are injured.
2000 – Israel's Foreign Minister David Levy carries out his threat to resign, accusing Prime Minister Ehud Barak of making too many concessions to the Palestinians.
2001 – Muslim extremists seize 36 Filipinos on the southern island of Basilan and behead at least four; Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic is jailed for 46 years for the murder of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two.
2001 – Ron Townson, the centrepiece singer for the pop group the 5th Dimension, dies of renal failure in Las Vegas. He was 68.
2002 – Kazakh authorities sentenced Galymzhan Zhakiyanov, founding member of the reform movement Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DCK), to seven years in prison for corruption and abuse of power.
2003 – The US State Department suspends two programs that allowed foreign air travellers on certain routes to enter the country without a visa.

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