TODAY IN HISTORY
1899 Jazz legend Duke Elllngton is born.
1913 Rudolf Diesel, French inventor of the diesel internal combustion engine, disappears at sea, presumably drowning in the English Channel.
1923 Britain begins to govern Palestine under a mandate from the League of Nations.
1938 The Munich agreement is signed between France, Germany, Britain and Italy, in which the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia is surrendered to Nazi Germany.
1941 The Germans kill 33,771 Jewish men, women and children in the Babi Yar massacre at a ravine near Kiev.
1950 General Douglas Macarthur hands over Seoul to President Syngman Rhee of South Korea.
1951 Death of Nguyễn Bình (born 1906), whose real name was Nguyễn Phương Thảo, Vietnamese army general. After the August Revolution in 1945, he was sent to southern Việt Nam to lead the armed liberation forces of independent Việt Nam against the returning French colonists at the end of World War II.
1959 Brunei's first written constitution is promulgated.
1967 An International Monetary Fund meeting in Rio de Janeiro agrees on the creation of a new monetary unit, the Special Drawing Right.
1997 Astronaut Jerry Linenger and cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev go on the first Us-russian space walk.
1998 Brazil announces an unprecedented plan to protect an area of Amazon forest half the size of France.
2000 Police in Azerbaijan beat back more than 1,000 demonstrators seeking to stage an unsanctioned opposition rally in the capital Baku.
2004 The Vatican, in its first speech ever to the UN General Assembly's annual autumn session for world leaders, calls for a total ban on human cloning and criticises the war in Iraq and unilateral responses to terrorism.
2006 Bolivian President Evo Morales joins Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in Havana for an endorsement of a socialist trade initiative aimed at providing an alternative to Usbacked free trade efforts in Latin America.
2007 Gunmen seriously wound one of Iraq's best known radio and television journalists, Amal almoudares, near her home in the capital. On April 5, Baghdad police found the bullet-ridden body of Khamael Muhsin, another famous radio and TV presenter.
2011 The Wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton takes place at Westminster Abbey in London.
2013 A powerful explosion occurs in an office building in Prague, believed to have been caused by natural gas, injures 43 people.
2019 Indonesian President Joko Widodo decides to relocate the nation's capital from Jakarta, on the northwest coast of Java island. Jakarta, home to over 10 million people, is sinking at one of the fastest rates in the world; almost half of its area is below sea level.
2020 A suicide bombing in Char Asiab, Kabul Province, kills three civilians and injures 15. No group has claimed responsibility for the incident. AP/REUTERS/VNS