Police in Austria arrested a man accused of holding his daughter captive in a windowless cellar for 24 years, fathering her seven children and killing one of them. (Josef Fritzl is serving life in a psychiatric ward.).
2005
Syria's 29-year military presence in Lebanon ended as Syrian soldiers completed a withdrawal brought about by international pressure and Lebanese street protests.
Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, a leading Guatemalan human rights activist, was bludgeoned to death two days after a report he'd compiled on atrocities during Guatemala's 36-year civil war was made public.
1994
The first multi-racial elections were held in South Africa.
The deadliest tornado in history kills about 1300 people. The Daulatpur–Saturia Tornado devastated everything in its 50-mile long path across central Bangladesh.
Franz Kafka publishes his landmark novel The Trial. The text, which was initially published as Der Process, is a nightmarish account of a man being arrested and prosecuted by a faceless authority for an unknown crime.
Harlow Shapley and Heber D. Curtis hold "great debate" on the nature of nebulae, galaxies and size of the universe at US National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.
John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, was surrounded by federal troops in a barn in Virginia. He was shot and killed, either by the soldiers or by his own hand.
An expedition of English colonists went ashore at Cape Henry, Va., to establish the first permanent English settlement in the Western Hemisphere. (They later settled at Jamestown.).