1349 – Between 100 and 3,000 Jews are killed in Black Death riots in Erfurt, Germany
1804 – Napoleonic Code adopted in France, stresses clearly written and accessible law
1871 – Journalist Henry Morton Stanley begins his famous expedition to Africa
1947 Pope Pius XII publishes encyclical Fulgens radiatur
1952 – The Moondog Coronation Ball is history’s first rock concert.
1963 – The U.S. federal prison on San Francisco Bay’s Alcatraz Island, which had held some of the most dangerous civilian prisoners—including Al Capone and Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz”—was closed.
1965 – American civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King, Jr., began a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
1975 – Ethiopia abolishes its monarchy after 3,000 years.
1984 – Part of Central Park is named Strawberry Fields honoring John Lennon
1990 – Namibia becomes independent of South Africa, Sam Nujoma becomes president
1991 – UN Security Council panel decided to lift the food embargo on Iraq
1993 – Pope John Paul II beatifies Duns Scotus, a philosopher-theologian of the Middle Ages 1999 – Swiss aviator Bertrand Piccard and British aviator Brian Jones become the first to circumnavigate the Earth in a hot air balloon.
2002 – In Pakistan, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh along with three other suspects are charged with murder for their part in the kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
2006 – Immigrant workers constructing the Burj Dubayy in Dubai, The United Arab Emirates and a new terminal of Dubai International Airport join together and riot, causing $1M in damage.
2012 – Greek Parliament votes in favour of an international bailout deal
2013 – 42 people are killed and 84 are injured by a bombing in a mosque in Damascus, Syria
2014 – Russia formally annexes Crimea amid international condemenation.
2018 – Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg admits they “made mistakes” after data on 50 million users is harvested by Cambridge Analytica
2018 – Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi accepts plea deal for 8 months in prison after slapping Israeli officer
2018 – African trade deal agreed by 44 African countries in Kigali, Rwanda
2018 – China announces greater controls over the media, including merging state-run radio and television broadcasters into a single conglomerate called “Voice of China”
2019 – US President Donald Trump says US should recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights on Twitter
2019 – Bangladeshi woman with two uteruses safely gives birth to twins 26 days after giving birth to another child
2020 – Italy records record daily death toll of 793 for COVID-19 as the worldwide death tolls surpasses 12,000 with 299,000 known infections (Johns Hopkins figures)
Film:
1940 – “Rebecca” based on the book by Daphne du Maurier, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine premieres in Miami, Florida (Best Picture 1941)
Music:
1961 – The Beatles’ first appearance at the Cavern Club in Liverpool
Sport:
1984 – NFL owners passed the infamous anti-celebrating rule
