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1929 β The town of Murchison, New Zealand is rocked by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake killing 17. At the time it was New Zealand's worst natural disaster.
1930 β U.S. president Herbert Hoover signs the SmootβHawley Tariff Act into law.
1932 β Bonus Army: Around a thousand World War I veterans amass at the United States Capitol as the U.S. Senate considers a bill that would give them certain benefits.
1933 β Union Station massacre: In Kansas City, Missouri, four FBI agents and captured fugitive Frank Nash are gunned down by gangsters attempting to free Nash.
1939 β Last public guillotining in France: Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, is executed in Versailles outside the Saint-Pierre prison.
1940 β World War II: RMS Lancastria is attacked and sunk by the Luftwaffe near Saint-Nazaire, France. At least 3,000 are killed in Britain's worst maritime disaster.
1940 β World War II: The British Army's 11th Hussars assault and take Fort Capuzzo in Libya from Italian forces.
1940 β The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fall under the occupation of the Soviet Union.
1944 β Iceland declares independence from Denmark and becomes a republic.
1952 β Guatemala passes Decree 900, ordering the redistribution of uncultivated land.
1953 β Cold War: East Germany Workers Uprising: In East Germany, the Soviet Union orders a division of troops into East Berlin to quell a rebellion.
1958 β The Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing, in the process of being built to connect Vancouver and North Vancouver (Canada), collapses into the Burrard Inlet killing 18 ironworkers and injuring others.
1960 β The Nez Perce tribe is awarded $4 million for 7 million acres (28,000 km2) of land undervalued at four cents/acre in the 1863 treaty.
1963 β The United States Supreme Court rules 8β1 in Abington School District v. Schempp against requiring the reciting of Bible verses and the Lord's Prayer in public schools.
1963 β A day after South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem announced the Joint CommuniquΓ© to end the Buddhist crisis, a riot involving around 2,000 people breaks out. One person is killed.
1967 β Nuclear weapons testing: China announces a successful test of its first thermonuclear weapon.
1971 β U.S. president Richard Nixon in a televised press conference calls drug abuse "America's public enemy number one", starting the war on drugs.
1972 β The Watergate scandal breaks out in Washington.
1985 β Space Shuttle program: STS-51-G mission: Space Shuttle Discovery launches carrying Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the first Arab and first Muslim in space, as a payload specialist.
1987 β With the death of the last individual of the species, the dusky seaside sparrow becomes extinct.
1989 β Interflug Flight 102 crashes during a rejected takeoff from Berlin SchΓΆnefeld Airport, killing 21 people.
1991 β Apartheid: The South African Parliament repeals the Population Registration Act which required racial classification of all South Africans at birth.
1992 β A "joint understanding" agreement on arms reduction is signed by U.S. president George Bush and Russian president Boris Yeltsin (this would be later codified in START II).
1994 β Following a televised low-speed highway chase, O. J. Simpson is arrested for the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.
2004 β The first virus written for mobile phones and spread via "Bluetooth" appears.
2015 β Nine people are killed in a mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
2017 β A series of wildfires in central Portugal kill at least 64 people and injure 204 others.