1950 - North Korea invaded South Korea, marking the beginning of the Korean War.
1975 - Mozambique gained independence, and Samora Machel was sworn in as president after 477 years of Portuguese rule.
1991 - Croatia and Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia, leading to the disintegration of the federation.
1996 - A bomb exploded in a Saudi military compound housing foreigners in Khobar, resulting in the deaths of 19 Americans and injuring nearly 400 people.
1997 - French oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, renowned for popularizing underwater exploration through films, passed away at the age of 87.
1998 - The first consumer copy of Microsoft Windows 98 was sold in the world, in Sydney.
2001 - Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid began his visit to Australia, the first in 26 years, heralding a new era between the two countries.
2002 - A 45-day countdown started for 3,000 white farmers in Zimbabwe to relinquish their lands, though many defied President Robert Mugabe's land seizure program.
2002 - WorldCom, the second-largest long-distance telecommunications company in the United States, fired its CFO Scott Sullivan and revealed it had inflated its earnings by $3.8 billion over five years.
2005 - Tehran's conservative mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a landslide victory in the Iranian presidential runoff against former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
2009 - Pop star Michael Jackson died.
