1902 -- Edward VII was crowned King of Great Britain and Ireland at Westminster Abbey.

1903 -- Following the death of Pope Leo XIII, Giuseppe Sarto was crowned as Pope Pius X before 70,000 people.

1919 -- Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Italian composer and librettist famed for his opera Pagliacci, died.

1942 -- After the All-India Congress agreed on a "Quit India" campaign, the British colonial authorities arrested Mahatma Gandhi and 50 others in Bombay.

1945 -- The United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Japan, this time on the city of Nagasaki; a wide area was reduced to ashes and more than 70,000 people were killed.

1965 -- Singapore became an independent republic within the Commonwealth of former British colonies after seceding from Malaysia.

1969 -- Actress Sharon Tate, the wife of film director Roman Polanski, was found brutally murdered with four others at their house in Beverly Hills, California.

1971 -- British security forces in Northern Ireland detained hundreds of guerrilla suspects and put them in the Maze prison, the beginning of a policy of internment without trial. Over 20 people died in the riots that followed.

1974 -- Gerald Ford was sworn in as 38th president of the United States after Richard Nixon resigned.

1975 -- Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich died. He wrote 15 symphonies as well as operas, ballets and film and theater scores.

1990 -- China's first airship, 40 meters (130 feet) long, made its maiden flight over the central province of Hubei.

1998 -- Kashmiri Muslim separatist Ali Mohammad Dar, self-styled deputy supreme commander of the banned Hizb-ul-Mujahideen group, died in a gun battle with Indian police.

2000 -- Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez arrived on the first visit to Iraq by an elected head of state since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

2001 -- Fifteen people died and some 90 were wounded in a suicide bombing at a pizza parlor on Bait-ul-Moqaddas's Jaffa Street.

2002 -- Lieutenant-General Tran Do, Vietnam's most prominent dissident, died at 78. In his later years he became a prominent advocate of political reform, declaring the party had to "change or die" and ditch socialism if that would boost economic growth. THOUGHT

To be upright is to be safe; to do wrong is to be blamed; to be impatient is to be repentant.

[Imam Ali (AS)]