1945 - Japanese commander Lt. Gen Ushijima committed suicide at Okinawa, site of the bloodiest battle of the Pacific theater of World War II; 234,183 people were officially recorded as killed in the battles.

1956 - Gamal Abdel Nasser was elected president of Egypt.

1959 - Klaus Fuchs, a German communist spy and naturalized Briton, was released from prison in England after serving nine years of a 14-year sentence for passing atomic secrets to Russia.

1960 - Patrice Lumumba became the first prime minister of the newly independent Republic of the Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

1967 - Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, reaffirming the Roman Catholic Church's traditional law on priestly celibacy.

1971 - The European Economic Community concluded negotiations for Britain's entry.

1978 - Renato Curcio, the leader of the Italian Red Brigade urban guerrillas, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

1980 - Sanjay Gandhi, eldest son of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, was killed when the plane he was piloting crashed.

1983 - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Congress could not veto presidential decisions.

1985 - An Air India Boeing 747 on a flight from Canada crashed into the sea over 100 miles off the coast of Ireland; all 329 passengers and crew were killed.

1994 - After decades as an international outcast, South Africa reclaimed its seat in the UN General Assembly.

1995 - Jonas Salk, the medical pioneer who developed the first vaccine against polio, died.

1996 - Andreas Papandreou, Greece's former socialist Prime Minister, died after a long illness.

1996 - Sheikh Hasina, head of the Awami League and daughter of Bangladesh's murdered Independence Leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, took office as the country's new prime minister.

2001 - Fugitive Peruvian spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos, Latin America's most wanted man, was captured in Venezuela.