1941 - The Germans advanced into Russia and took Vilna, Brest-Litovsk and Kaunas.

1947 - An American pilot reported seeing strange objects in the sky looking like "saucers skipping across the water". This incident led to the first use of the term "flying saucers".

1948 - Russia began a blockade of Berlin, stopping all land traffic and food from entering the city from West Germany.

1963 - As a step toward independence, Zanzibar achieved internal self-government.

1967 - A referendum in Zaire, in which women voted for the first time, approved a new Constitution.

1970 - Alexander Dubcek, former leader of Czechoslovakia whose reforms led to the Soviet invasion in 1968, was dismissed from his post as ambassador to Turkey.

1973 - Eamon de Valera, then the world's oldest statesman, resigned as president of Ireland at the age of 90.

1975 - A U.S. Eastern Airlines Boeing 727 crashed near Kennedy Airport, killing 113 people out of 124 aboard.

1978 - The president of the Yemen Arab Republic, Lt-Colonel Ahmed Hussein al-Ghashni, was killed by a parcel bomb.

1983 - Yasser Arafat was ordered to leave Syria by president Assad.

1987 - In South Korea, Kim Dae-Jung and 300 other dissidents were released after two weeks of unrest in the country.

1989 - Zhao Ziyang, who had expressed sympathy with pro-democracy students, was replace by Jiang Zemin as general secretary of the Communist Party.

1994 - The European Union and Russia signed a landmark friendship accord in Corfu, Greece, designed to help stabilize Russia and bring it closer to its former rivals.