1917 -- Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in Russia together with his son. On the same day, a provisional government succeeded under Prince Georgi Lvov and with Pavel Miliukov as foreign minister.

1922 -- The sultan of Egypt assumed the title of king as Fuad I.

1937 -- The first central blood bank to preserve blood for transfusion by refrigeration was set up at Cook County Hospital in Chicago.

1939 -- The German army crossed the Czech frontier and Adolf Hitler proclaimed the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

1964 -- Elizabeth Taylor married Richard Burton in Montreal.

1975 -- Aristotle Onassis, Greek shipping magnate, died. In 1968 he married Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

1979 -- Pope John Paul II published his first encyclical "Redemptor Hominis" in which he warned of the growing gap between rich and poor.

1983 -- Dame Rebecca West (Cicily Isabel Fairfield), British author, died.

1990 -- Mikhail Gorbachev was elected the first executive president of the Soviet Union.

1996 -- Pioneering aviation firm Fokker NV, once a byword for industrial expertise, collapsed, ending 77 years of Dutch aircraft making and triggering the biggest mass redundancy in Dutch history.

1999 -- Rosemary Nelson, one of Northern Ireland's best known Catholic human rights lawyers, was killed by a car bomb.

2000 -- Idris Abdulwakil died. The former diplomat and chief of protocol, was the fourth president of Zanzibar and ruled from 1985 to 1990.

2002 -- The U.S. government suspended new business dealings with Enron Corp. and its former accounting firm Andersen, citing evidence of misconduct.

2003 -- From Tokyo to Beirut, Paris to Washington, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in what many saw as a last-ditch global protest against any U.S.-led war on Iraq.

2005 -- Bernard Ebbers, former chief executive of WorldCom Inc., was found guilty of fraud charges related to a $11 billion accounting scandal at the telecommunications company. He was later sentenced to 25 years in prison.