Following are some of the major events to have occurred on Aug. 31:
1907 – The Anglo-Russian Convention was signed in St Petersburg, settling differences between Britain and Russia over Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet.
1969 – Rocky Marciano, the American former world heavyweight boxing champion, was killed in an air crash in Iowa.
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.
1997 – Britain’s Princess Diana and her companion Dodi Al Fayed were killed in a car crash in Paris.
2002 – Lionel Hampton, one of America’s jazz legends, died aged 94. He pioneered and popularised the vibraphone and teamed up with a long list of jazz greats over a musical career that spanned six decades.
2003 – World’s longest television makes its debut at Hong Kong’s Shatin race track.
2005 – About 1,000 Iraqi Shi’ites died in a stampede over a Tigris River bridge in Baghdad, panicked by rumours that a suicide bomber was about to blow himself up.
2005 – The 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.
2006 – Norwegian police recovered Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream”, two years after the masterpiece was stolen by gunmen from a museum in Oslo.
2016 – Brazil’s Senate removes President Dilma Rousseff from office.
(Reuters)