1904 -- The Russo-Japanese War began when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in northeast China.

1924 -- The gas chamber was used for the first time as a form of execution when Gee Jon was put to death in Nevada for murder.

1937 -- General Francisco Franco captured Malaga with the help of 15,000 Italians during the Spanish civil war.

1949 -- Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty of Hungary was sentenced to life imprisonment for anti-state activities.

1963 -- Iraqi president Abdel-Karim Kassem was overthrown and killed in a military coup.

1974 -- The crew of the United States' final Skylab mission, Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson and William Pogue, returned to earth.

1983 -- The Kahan report on the September 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Christian militiamen in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila camps -- surrounded at the time by Israeli forces -- found Israeli leaders including then-defense minister Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible.

1989 -- An American airliner taking Italian tourists to a Caribbean holiday crashed in the mid-Atlantic Azores, killing all 144 people aboard.

1999 -- Iris Murdoch, one of the great British novelists of the 20th century whose books included The Sea, the Sea and An Accidental Man, died at 79.

2001 -- Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl agreed to an offer by public prosecutors under which he would pay a 300,000 mark ($142,000) fine to end a criminal fraud probe against him over secret cash donations that he accepted while in power.

2002 -- North Korea, described by U.S. President Bush as part of an "Axis of Evil", hit back by describing the United States as the "Empire of the Devil".