1868

In the early days of the French conquest, peasants in southern Viet Nam rise up under Nguyen Trung Truc, overrunning a French camp at Rach Gia, in the Kien Giang Province. They eventually destroyed the entire French garrison in the province.

1917

The first All-Russian Congress of the Soviets is convened.

1919

Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh) sends on behalf of "a group of Vietnamese patriots" residing in France, a List of Claims by the Vietnamese People to the Versailles Conference, where the victors meet after World War I. The claims demand amnesty for political detainees, the reform of the Indochinese judicial system, freedom of press, opinion, association, and assembly, freedom to emigrate and travel abroad, freedom of education, replacement of the regime of decrees by that of laws, and the presence of natives in the French Parliament.

1949

In the First Indochina War against the return of French colonists, resistance forces begin a month long operation in north-western Viet Nam, overrunning a number of French posts and expanding the resistance zone by 6,000sq.km.

1971

The US Senate votes against a plan calling for total American troop withdrawal from Viet Nam by the end of the year.

1976

Bloody rioting erupts in Soweto, the largest black township in South Africa, prompting months of racial upheaval in which 600 blacks and three whites die.

1992

The US and Russia agree to slash their arsenals of long range nuclear weapons by two-thirds reducing the chance of a "nuclear nightmare".

2003

A drought that began in 2001 puts some 12.6 million Ethiopians at risk of starving to death, United Nations food agencies say, adding that this could lead to the worst famine since a 1984-85 crisis in which a million people died of starvation.

2005

Masked gunmen seize dozens of children at an international school in northwestern Cambodia, killing a three-year-old Canadian boy and threatening to shoot others before police rescue the hostages. — AP/REUTERS/VNS