2014: Two people are shot and killed and 29 students are taken hostage at a high school in Moscow, Russia.
2007: A Baghdad market bombing kills at least 135 people and injures a further 339.
1998: Cavalese cable car disaster: a United States military pilot causes the death of 20 people when his low-flying plane cuts the cable of a cable-car near Trento, Italy.
1989: After a stroke two weeks previously, South African President P. W. Botha resigns as leader of the National Party, but stays on as president for six more months.
1984: John Buster and the research team at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center announce history's first embryo transfer, from one woman to another resulting in a live birth.
1972: The first day of the seven-day 1972 Iran blizzard, which would kill at least 4,000 people, making it the deadliest snowstorm in history.
1971: New York Police Officer Frank Serpico is shot during a drug bust in Brooklyn and survives to later testify against police corruption.
1961: The United States Air Forces begins Operation Looking Glass, and over the next 30 years, a "Doomsday Plane" is always in the air, with the capability of taking direct control of the United States' bombers and missiles in the event of the destruction of the SAC's command post.
1960: British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan speaks of "a wind of change", signalling that his Government was likely to support decolonisation.
1953: The Batepá massacre occurred in São Tomé when the colonial administration and Portuguese landowners unleashed a wave of violence against the native creoles known as forros.
1945: World War II: The United States and the Philippine Commonwealth begin a month-long battle to retake Manila from Japan.
1945: World War II: As part of Operation Thunderclap, 1,000 B-17s of the Eighth Air Force bomb Berlin, a raid which kills between 2,500 and 3,000 and dehouses another 120,000.
1943: The SS Dorchester is sunk by a German U-boat. Only 230 of 902 men aboard survive.
1933: Adolf Hitler announces that the expansion of Lebensraum into Eastern Europe, and its ruthless Germanisation, are the ultimate geopolitical objectives of Third Reich foreign policy.
1931: The Hawke's Bay earthquake, New Zealand's worst natural disaster, kills 258.
1917: World War I: The United States breaks off diplomatic relations with Germany a day after the latter announced a new policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.
1916: The Centre Block of the Parliament buildings in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada burns down with the loss of 7 lives.
1807: A British military force, under Brigadier-General Sir Samuel Auchmuty captures the Spanish Empire city of Montevideo, now the capital of Uruguay.
1706: During the Battle of Fraustadt Swedish forces defeat a superior Saxon-Polish-Russian force by deploying a double envelopment.
1690: The colony of Massachusetts issues the first paper money in the Americas.
1509: The Portuguese navy defeats a joint fleet of the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Venice, the Sultan of Gujarat, the Mamlûk Burji Sultanate of Egypt, the Zamorin of Calicut, and the Republic of Ragusa at the Battle of Diu in Diu, India.