1914 - Germany declared war on France at the beginning of World War I.
1977 - The Archbishop of Cyprus, Makarios, died of a heart attack in Nicosia.
1998 - One of the most original and influential composers to emerge from the Soviet Union, Alfred Schnittke, died.
2000 - The Indonesian Attorney General's Office accused former President Suharto of corruption.
2001 - The Thai Constitutional Court acquitted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of charges that he intentionally concealed assets, allowing him to remain in office.
2002 - The Turkish parliament abolished the death penalty in peacetime as part of major reforms to prepare the country for European Union membership talks.
2004 - The Statue of Liberty in New York reopened to visitors for the first time since the September 11, 2001 attacks, after security improvements that cost over $30 million in donations.
2005 - The Mauritanian army took power in a bloodless coup from President Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya.
2006 - Arthur Lee, the singer and guitarist of the influential rock band Love, died of leukemia.
2008 - At least 145 people, mostly women and children, were crushed to death in a stampede at the Naina Devi temple in Himachal Pradesh, northern India.
2008 - The dissident Soviet writer and Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who revealed the horrors of Stalin's camps to the world, died.
