1941 -- Nine Allied governments meeting in London pledged allegiance to the Atlantic charter, an eight-point declaration issued by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill.

1960 -- The first U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, was launched from Newport, Virginia.

1971 -- Ninety Russian diplomats were expelled from Britain for spying following revelations by a Soviet defector.

1980 -- Iraqi troops crossed the border into Iran and encircled Abadan, setting fire to the world's biggest oil refinery and launching full-scale hostilities.

1988 -- Canadian Ben Johnson set a 100 meters world record of 9.79 seconds at the Olympic Games in Seoul. Six days later he was stripped of his medal for taking drugs.

1993 -- Norodom Sihanouk reclaimed the Cambodian throne he had relinquished in 1955 and signed into law a constitution proclaiming his ravaged country a democratic, constitutional monarchy.

1995 -- Thirteen people were killed in the southern French town of Cuers when Eric Borel, 16, ran amok with a rifle in one of the bloodiest crimes in modern French history.

The previous day he had killed his mother, stepfather and half-brother after an argument over where he should live.

1996 -- Russian spy Pavel Sudoplatov, who stole U.S. plans for the atom bomb and arranged to have Leon Trotsky killed with an ice pick, died. He was 89.

1999 -- Former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti was acquitted of ordering the murder of a journalist in 1979, the finale to one of Italy's most sensational court cases.

2000 -- Vladimiro Montesinos, the spy chief at the center of a political crisis that prompted new elections, left Peru to seek political asylum in Panama.