1904 -- The steamship General Slocum caught fire and sank in New York harbor. Around 1,000 people died, many of them women and children on a church outing.

1919 -- The Englishmen John Alcock and Arthur Brown completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight.

1920 -- Guglielmo Marconi made the first radio broadcast of live music, featuring the Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba, from Chelmsford, England.

1977 -- Adolfo Suarez and his Democratic Center coalition won the first democratic elections in Spain for 41 years.

1978 -- Italian President Giovanni Leone was forced to resign over allegations of fiscal mismanagement and possible involvement in the Lockheed bribery scandal.

1988 -- Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq decreed that Sharia, the Islamic legal code, would be the supreme law in Pakistan.

1991 -- Sikh militants killed 76 passengers, mostly Hindus, on two trains in an attempt to frighten voters into staying at home on election day in the north Indian state of Punjab.

1999 -- South Korea sank one North Korean gunboat and heavily damaged others in the first naval clash in the Yellow Sea since the 1950-1953 Korean War.

2001 -- The Shanghai Five -- China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan -- welcomed new member Uzbekistan and renamed themselves the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a regional organization to combat Islamic militancy.

2002 -- A federal jury found the accounting firm Andersen guilty of obstructing justice in an investigation of its client, Enron Corp.

2003 -- Hume Cronyn, whose career on Broadway and in Hollywood spanned more than six decades, died. He was 91.