1926 -- Americans Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett became the first people to fly over the North Pole.

1927 -- Canberra replaced Melbourne as the capital of Australia.

1931 -- Albert Michelson, U.S. physicist who established that light has a constant speed, died. In 1907 he won the Nobel Prize for Physics.

1945 -- Field Marshal Keitel signed Germany's final surrender documents to end World War II in Europe; the German garrison in the Channel Islands surrendered.

1946 -- King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy abdicated and the monarchy was later replaced by a republic.

1960 -- The United States became the first country to legalize use of the birth control pill.

1965 -- Lunar 5, an unmanned Soviet spacecraft was launched towards the moon from a rocket already in Earth's orbit. It later crashed on the moon rather than the projected soft landing.

1976 -- Ulrike Meinhof, a leader of the German Baader-Meinhof guerrilla group, hanged herself in prison.

1978 -- The body of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro was found in the boot of a car in Rome; he had been kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades.

1986 -- Sherpa Tenzing Norgay died; he shared with Edmund Hillary the achievement of being the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953.

1993 -- Paraguay held its first presidential and parliamentary elections for nearly 50 years.

2001 -- A total of 126 people died after a stampede at Accra's main soccer stadium when police fire teargas at rioting fans. It was Africa's worst ever soccer disaster.

2001 -- Nicos Sampson, leader of a brief Greek-inspired coup which prompted the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, died aged 66.

2002 -- A radio-controlled landmine exploded in Kaspiisk in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan killing 42 people and wounding 150 during a Victory Day parade.

2002 -- A huge ice shelf 10 times bigger than Manhattan plummeted into the sea near Antarctica, U.S. government scientists announced.

2004 -- Chechnya's Moscow-backed president, Akhmad Kadyrov, was killed when a bomb blast tore through a packed stadium in Grozny.