1951 -- Winston Churchill was appointed British prime minister for a second time following the Conservative party's narrow victory in elections the previous day.

1955 -- South Vietnam was proclaimed a republic by Ngo Dinh Diem, who declared himself president.

1956 -- A statute was signed setting up the International Atomic Energy Agency.

1962 -- During the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent a note to U.S. President John F. Kennedy offering to withdraw his missiles from Cuba if the U.S. withdrew its bases from Turkey. The offer was rejected.

1972 -- Igor Sikorsky, Russian inventor of the first successful helicopter, died in the United States.

1979 -- South Korean President Park Chung-hee was shot and killed by his intelligence chief.

1994 -- Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in a ceremony at their border attended by U.S. President Bill Clinton.

1995 -- Radical Palestinian leader Fathi Shqaqi was killed in Malta by unknown assailants.

1997 -- Residents of the breakaway Indian Ocean island of Anjouan voted overwhelmingly for independence from the Federal Islamic Republic of the Comoros.

2000 -- An Ilyushin-18 aircraft ploughed into a mountain in ex-Soviet Georgia, killing more than 80 people.

2001 -- Abdul Haq, veteran Afghan opposition commander, is captured and executed by Taliban troops while he is on a mission inside Afghanistan to gather support for a peace plan.

2002 -- 129 of a total 750 hostages were killed when Russian Special Forces stormed a Moscow theater at dawn to end a three-day siege by Chechen rebels. Only two died of gunshot wounds, the rest of gas poisoning. 41 guerrillas were also killed.