• Scientists at Boston University announce a potential cure for the disease Ebola.
• Dario Franchitti wins the Indianapolis 500.
• " Satellite" by Lena (pictured) wins the Eurovision Song Contest for Germany.
• The Social Democratic Party wins a plurality in a legislative election in the Czech Republic, but its leader Jiří Paroubek resigns citing a poorer-than-expected result.
• Nearly 100 people are killed and 120 more injured in two attacks in Lahore, Pakistan.
• A train derails in West Bengal, India, killing more than 100 people.
• The Alaotra Grebe, a bird endemic to Madagascar, is declared extinct, 25 years after the last confirmed sighting.

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June 29: Seventeenth of Tammuz ( Judaism, 2010); Feast of Saints Peter and Paul ( Roman Catholicism)

• 1613 – The original Globe Theatre in London burned to the ground after a cannon employed for special effects misfired during a performance of William Shakespeare's Henry VIII and ignited the theatre's roof.
• 1880 – Pomare V, King of Tahiti, was forced to cede the sovereignty of Tahiti and its dependencies to France.
• 1889 – Hyde Park and several other Illinois townships voted to be annexed by Chicago, forming the largest United States city in area and second largest in population.
• 1967 – Actress Jayne Mansfield, her boyfriend Sam Brody, and their driver were killed in a car accident outside of New Orleans, while her children Miklós, Zoltán, and Mariska Hargitay escaped with only minor injuries.
• 1995 – Shuttle–Mir Program: During the STS-71 mission, Space Shuttle Atlantis became the first space shuttle to dock with the Russian space station Mir (pictured).

December 10: Human Rights Day; Constitution Day in Thailand ( 1932)

• 1684 – Edmond Halley presented the paper De motu corporum in gyrum, containing Isaac Newton's derivation of Kepler's laws from his theory of gravity, to the Royal Society.
• 1861 – Forces led by Nguyen Trung Truc, an anti-colonial guerrilla leader in southern Vietnam, sank the French lorcha L'Esperance.
• 1907 – During the Brown Dog affair, about 1,000 protesters marched through London and then clashed with 400 police officers in Trafalgar Square over the existence of a memorial for animals which have been vivisected.
• 1936 – Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, out of a desire to marry American socialite Wallis Simpson (pictured) against widespread opposition, abdicated the throne, the only British monarch to have voluntarily done so since the Anglo-Saxon period.
• 1979 – The Kuomintang (KMT) dictatorship of Taiwan arrested a large number of opposition leaders who had organized pro- democracy demonstrations, an incident credited with ending the KMT's rule in 2000.

January 24

• 41 – Roman Emperor Caligula was murdered by Cassius Chaerea and the disgruntled Praetorian Guards. Caligula's uncle Claudius was proclaimed emperor in his place.
• 1776 – American Revolutionary War: Henry Knox arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with cannons recently captured from Fort Ticonderoga, the use of which would later help break the Siege of Boston.
• 1968 – Vietnam War: The 1st Australian Task Force launched Operation Coburg against the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong during wider fighting around Long Binh and Bien Hoa.
• 1984 – The first Apple Macintosh, today known as the Macintosh 128K (pictured), went on sale, becoming the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command line interface.
• 2009 – Klaus, the most damaging storm since Lothar and Martin in December 1999, made landfall near Bordeaux, France.

• French, British and American forces launch attacks on pro- Gaddafi troops in Libya in support of the UN-mandated no-fly zone.
• Knut (pictured), a polar bear raised by zookeepers at the Berlin Zoo, dies at the age of four.
• The Moon reaches its most extreme perigee-syzygy (a " supermoon") since 1993.
• Former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher dies at the age of 85.
• NASA's MESSENGER space probe becomes the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury.
• Yemen declares a state of emergency after unidentified gunmen open fire on anti-government protesters, killing at least 45.

April 3

• 1043 – Edward the Confessor was crowned King of England, the last king of the House of Wessex.
• 1895 – The libel trial instigated by Irish author Oscar Wilde began, eventually resulting in Wilde's arrest, trial and imprisonment on charges of gross indecency.
• 1922 – Joseph Stalin (pictured) became the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
• 1971 – The Japanese tokusatsu television series Kamen Rider premiered, marking the beginning of the long-running Kamen Rider franchise.
• 2008 – Texas law enforcement authorities raided the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' YFZ Ranch, eventually removing 533 women and children from the premises.

July 16

• 1790 – U.S. President George Washington signed the Residence Act, selecting a new permanent site along the Potomac River for the capital of the United States, which later became Washington, D.C.
• 1945 – Manhattan Project: " Trinity", the first nuclear test explosion, was carried out near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
• 1951 – The Catcher in the Rye, an American coming-of-age novel by J. D. Salinger, was first published.
• 1994 – Fragments of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 began hitting the planet Jupiter (impact site pictured), with the first one causing a fireball which reached a peak temperature of about 24,000  K.
• 2007 – A magnitude 6.6  M_W earthquake struck Niigata Prefecture, Japan, causing a leak of radioactive gases from the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant.

September 27: World Tourism Day

• 1422 – The Treaty of Melno was signed, establishing the Prussian–Lithuanian border, which afterwards remained unchanged for about 500 years.
• 1941 – SS Patrick Henry, the first of 2,751 Liberty ships built during World War II by the United States, was launched.
• 1983 – Software developer Richard Stallman announced plans for the Unix-like GNU operating system (logo pictured), the first free software developed by the GNU Project.
• 1993 – War in Abkhazia: After capturing the city of Sukhumi, Abkhaz separatists and their allies massacred large numbers of Georgian civilians.
• 2001 – The Jagadguru Rambhadracharya Handicapped University, the only university in the world exclusively for the disabled, was founded in Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh, India.

August 11: Independence Day in Chad ( 1960)

• 1492 – The first papal conclave held in the Sistine Chapel elected Roderic Borja as Pope Alexander VI to succeed Pope Innocent VIII.
• 1828 – William Corder was hanged at Bury St Edmunds, England, for the murder of Maria Marten at the Red Barn.
• 1945 – Amid rumors of kidnappings of children by Jews in Kraków, a crowd of Poles engaged in a pogrom, which resulted in one dead and five wounded victims.
• 1962 – Vostok 3 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev (pictured) became the first person to float in microgravity.
• 1973 – At a party in the recreation room of a New York City apartment building, DJ Kool Herc began rapping during an extended break, laying the foundation for hip-hop music.

• Militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant capture the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Tikrit.
• All the Way wins Best Play and A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder wins Best Musical at the Tony Awards.
• In tennis, the French Open concludes with Rafael Nadal winning the men's singles and Maria Sharapova (pictured) winning the women's singles.
• At least 36 people are killed in an attack on Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, Pakistan.
• In horse racing, Australia wins the Epsom Derby and Tonalist wins the Belmont Stakes.
• An estimated 35 people are killed in an attack on a village in South Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Ongoing: FIFA World Cup – Ukrainian conflict
Recent deaths: Johnny Leach – Rik Mayall

August 11: Tu B'Av (Judaism, 2014); Independence Day in Chad ( 1960)

• 2492 BC – According to legend, Armenian culture hero Hayk slew the giant king Bel with a shot from a longbow near Lake Van (in modern Turkey).
• 1492 – The first papal conclave held in the Sistine Chapel elected Roderic Borja as Pope Alexander VI to succeed Pope Innocent VIII.
• 1786 – Captain Francis Light founded the British colony of Penang, beginning more than a century of British involvement in Malaya.
• 1942 – Actress Hedy Lamarr (pictured) and composer George Antheil received a patent for their "Secret Communications System", an early technique of frequency-hopping spread spectrum that later became the basis for many forms of today's wireless communication systems.
• 2012 – At least 306 people were killed and 3,000 others injured in a pair of earthquakes near Tabriz, Iran.