Reuters
1945 - Pierre Laval was executed for betraying his country during World War Two. As premier of Vichy, France from 1942 to 1944, he pursued a policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany.
1946 - Hermann Goering, the highest ranking Nazi tried at Nuremberg, committed suicide by taking a cyanide capsule in his prison cell the night before he was to be hanged.
1987 - Captain Thomas Sankara, president of Burkina Faso, was killed in a coup and replaced by Captain Blaise Compaore.
1993 - Nelson Mandela and President F.W. de Klerk were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to end apartheid and lay the foundations for a democratic South Africa.
1997 - David Huxley breaks world record at Sydney's Mascot airport pulling a 747 jumbo jet.
1998 - Lebanon's parliament elected General Emile Lahoud to be the country's first president since the civil war.
2003 - China became the third nation to launch a manned space rocket with a 21-hour orbital voyage around the earth.
2003 - The U.S.-led Iraqi administration introduced newly printed bank notes replacing the old currency bills bearing the face of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein."
2008 - The late Pope John Paul was wounded by a knife-wielding priest in 1982, a year after he was shot in St Peter's Square, but the injury was kept secret, his former top aide Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz said in a documentary film.
2010 - Drill machine breaks through rock at final section of NEAT Gotthard Base Tunnel construction site in Switzerland where the world's longest train tunnel will cross the Alps.
2013 - Hundreds die as a 7.2 magnitude earthquake strikes islands popular with tourists in the Philippines.
