1934 -- King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou, who were negotiating an alliance, were assassinated by Vlada Chernozamsky, a Croat, in Marseille.

1958 -- Pope Pius XII, who headed the Roman Catholic Church during World War II, died aged 82.

1958 -- The first heart pacemaker successfully implanted was given to Arne Larsson by surgeon Ake Senning in Stockholm.

1962 -- Uganda became independent after nearly 70 years of British rule.

1963 -- The Vaiont Dam in northeast Italy overflowed and flooded four villages, killing over 2,000 people.

1967 -- Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Argentine-born guerrilla, was killed in Bolivia while leading a Cuban-sponsored force.

1969 -- Czechoslovakia's frontiers were closed to tens of thousands of citizens bound for the West on private visits as new government travel restrictions went into effect.

1970 -- Cambodia re-styled itself the Khmer Republic.

1975 -- Andrei Sakharov, Soviet physicist, dissident and human rights campaigner, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

1983 -- Four South Korean cabinet ministers were killed by a bomb in Rangoon, now Yangon, capital of Myanmar.

1990 -- Nelson Mandela returned to South Africa's notorious Robben Island and said "the emotions ran wild" when he met prisoners in the jail where he spent 20 years of his life.

1995 -- Sir Alec Douglas-Home, former British Conservative prime minister, died.

1997 -- Hurricane Pauline killed more than 200 people in the Mexican tourist resort of Acapulco.

2001 -- Javed Iqbal, sentenced to be strangled, chopped into 100 pieces and dissolved in acid for the murders of dozens of children, was found dead in his cell in an apparent suicide.

2002 -- Russia held its first post-Soviet census, mobilizing 650,000 workers across 11 time zones.