1917 -- Russian Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin overthrew the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky in Petrograd.

1944 -- U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was re-elected for a record fourth term.

1962 -- Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, died. She served for several years as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations.

1972 -- U.S. President Richard Nixon was re-elected for a second term. In 1974, he became the first U.S. president to resign, after the Watergate scandal.

1985 -- Troops stormed Colombia's Palace of Justice in Bogota to end a 24-hour siege by gunmen of the M-19 guerrilla movement; 95 people were killed.

1987 -- Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba, in office since independence in 1956, was overthrown in a bloodless coup.

1989 -- East Germany's communist government resigned after pro-democracy protests.

1990 -- Mary Robinson was elected Ireland's first woman president.

1996 -- A Nigerian Boeing 727 airliner carrying 142 people crashed some 40km (25 miles) from Lagos, killing all on board.

1998 -- Britain's Lord Hunt, who led the first successful expedition to the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, died aged 88.

2001 -- The Belgian national airline Sabena filed for bankruptcy -- the first European flag carrier to do so in the upheaval to the industry caused by the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

2002 -- In a setback to talks between London and Madrid, Gibraltarians overwhelmingly voted 'No' in a referendum on a British-Spanish plan to share sovereignty of the British colony.

2004 -- The South African playwright Gibson Kente, the founding father of black township theatre who announced he had HIV/AIDS, died aged 72.

2005 -- Chile arrested Peru's disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori, wanted in Peru on human rights abuse and corruption charges, a day after his arrival in Santiago.