2015: Blue Origin's New Shepard space vehicle became the first rocket to successfully fly to space and then return to Earth for a controlled, vertical landing.
2011: Arab Spring: After 11 months of protests in Yemen, Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh signs a deal to transfer power to the vice president, in exchange for legal immunity.
2010: Bombardment of Yeonpyeong: North Korean artillery attack kills two civilians and two marines on Yeonpyeong Island, South Korea.
2007: MS Explorer, a cruise liner carrying 154 people, sinks in the Antarctic Ocean south of Argentina after hitting an iceberg near the South Shetland Islands. There are no fatalities.
2006: A series of bombings kills at least 215 people and injures 257 others in Sadr City, making it the second deadliest sectarian attack since the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003.
2005: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is elected president of Liberia and becomes the first woman to lead an African country.
1980: The 6.9 Mw Irpinia earthquake shakes southern Italy with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme), killing 2,483-4,900, and injuring 7,700-8,934.
1978: The Geneva Frequency Plan of 1975 goes into effect, realigning many of Europe's longwave and mediumwave broadcasting frequencies.
1978: Cyclone kills about 1000 people in eastern Sri Lanka.
1976: ApneistJacques Mayol is the first man to reach a depth of 100 m undersea without breathing equipment.
1974: Sixty Ethiopian politicians, aristocrats, military officers, and other persons are executed by the provisional military government.
1972: The Soviet Union makes its final attempt at successfully launching the N1 rocket.
1963: The BBC broadcasts the first episode of An Unearthly Child (starring William Hartnell), the first story from the first series of Doctor Who, which is now the world's longest running science fiction drama.
1959: French President Charles de Gaulle declares in a speech in Strasbourg his vision for "Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals".
1955: The Cocos Islands are transferred from the control of the United Kingdom to that of Australia.
1953: Pilot Felix Moncla and Lieutenant Robert Wilson disappear while in pursuit of a mysterious craft over Lake Superior.
1946: French naval bombardment of Hai Phong, Vietnam, kills thousands of civilians.
1943: World War II: Tarawa and Makin atolls fall to American forces.
1940: World War II: Romania becomes a signatory of the Tripartite Pact, officially joining the Axis powers.
1939: World War II: HMS Rawalpindi is sunk by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.
1936: Life magazine is reborn as a photo magazine and enjoys instant success.
1934: An Anglo-Ethiopian boundary commission in the Ogaden discovers an Italian garrison at Walwal, well within Ethiopian territory. This leads to the Abyssinia Crisis.
1924: Edwin Hubble's discovery, that the Andromeda "nebula" is actually another island galaxy far outside of our own Milky Way, is first published in The New York Times.
1914: Mexican Revolution: The last of U.S. forces withdraw from Veracruz, occupied seven months earlier in response to the Tampico Affair.
1910: Johan Alfred Ander becomes the last person to be executed in Sweden.
1890: King William III of the Netherlands dies without a male heir and a special law is passed to allow his daughter Princess Wilhelmina to succeed him.
1889: The first jukebox goes into operation at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco.
1876: Corrupt Tammany Hall leader William Magear Tweed (better known as Boss Tweed) is delivered to authorities in New York City after being captured in Spain.