1930 - Mahatma gandhi was arrested by the British in India after his campaign of disobedience.

1936 - Italian troops took Addis Ababa.

1945 - U.S. forces liberated Austria's Mauthausen concentration camp.

1945 - American poet Ezra Pound was arrested in Italy for treason.

1950 - The coronation of King Phumiphon of Siam took place and he assumed the title of Rama IX.

1955 - The Federal Republic of Germany became a sovereign state again after the Allied high commissioners met in order to abolish themselves. West Germany also joined NATO on this day.

1961 - Alan Shepard became the first American in space in a 15-minute sub-orbital flight.

1980 - British elite SAS troops stormed the Iranian Embassy in London, killing four of the five gunmen who had taken over the building and seized hostages.

1981 - Bobby Sands became the first of 10 Irish Republican army hunger strikers to die in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland.

1993 - Irving Howe, U.S. writer and intellectual, died. He is best known for "World of Our Fathers", a study of East European Jewish immigrants in the United States.

1996 - King Juan Carlos swore in conservative leader Jose Maria Aznar as Spanish prime minister after 13 years of Socialist rule.

1999 - Indonesia and Portugal signed an agreement leading to independence for the territory of East Timor.

2000 - Reformist judge Ahmet Necdet Sezer was elected Turkey's president and immediately called for more democracy.

2001 - In Angola UNITA rebels kidnapped 51 boys and nine girls from a boarding school for war orphans outside Caxito, northeast of Luanda. Some 200 civilians died in the raid.