Reuters
Following are some of the major events to have occurred on August 3:
1914 - Germany declared war on France at the start of World War One.
1977 - Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus died of a heart attack in Nicosia.
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 that he had deliberately concealed assets, allowing him to carry on in the post.
2002 - Turkey's parliament abolished the death penalty in peacetime as part of major reforms to prepare the country for European Union membership talks.
2004 - The Statue of Liberty in New York reopened to visitors for the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, following security and safety improvements paid for by more than $30 million in donations.
2005 - The army in Mauritania seized power in a bloodless coup from President Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya.
2006 - Arthur Lee, the eccentric singer/guitarist with the influential 1960s rock band Love, died of leukaemia.
2008 - At least 145 people, mostly women and children, were crushed to death in a stampede at the Naina Devi temple, in Himachal Pradesh state in northern India.
2008 - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident writer and Nobel literature prize winner who revealed the horror of Stalin's camps to the world, died.
