1936 - Sixteen opponents of Soviet leader Josef Stalin were executed in Russia after a show trial.

1940 - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were incorporated into the Soviet Union.

1940 - British aircraft dropped their first bombs on Berlin in an overnight raid in World War II.

1942 - The duke of Kent, youngest brother of Britain's king George VI, was killed in an air crash on a wartime mission to Iceland.

1944 - Paris was liberated when the local German commander surrendered to the Allies.

1964 - Kenneth Kaunda became president-designate of Zambia, formerly the British colony of Northern Rhodesia.

1967 - The leader of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, was shot dead.

1978 - The Turin shroud, venerated as the burial cloth of Christ, went on public display for the first time in 45 years.

1988 - Direct talks between Iran and Iraq began in an attempt to stop their eight-year-old war.

1989 - After a 12-year journey, the U.S. spacecraft Voyager 2 flew over the planet Neptune and its moon Triton, sending back photographs of swampy areas, frozen lakes and craters.

1991 - Belarus declared independence from the Soviet Union.

1997 - Egon Krenz, East Germany's last hard-line communist leader, was sentenced to six and a half years in jail for the deaths of citizens killed while fleeing over the Berlin Wall.

2000 - Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe gave formal notice that the government would appropriate 509 white-owned farms to resettle land-less Blacks.