1731 - Death of Daniel Defoe, British journalist and author of Robinson Crusoe.

1792 - Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle composes La Marseillaise, later the French national anthem.

1955 - The last French expeditionary troops leave Việt Nam’s north-eastern province of Quảng Ninh at the end of the First Indochina War.

1967 - Liberation forces in Việt Nam’s central provinces of Quảng Trị and Thừa Thiên

begin an offensive on US and Sài Gòn forces in the areas of Khe Sanh, Cồn Tiên, Dốc Miếu, Đông Hà and Height 24, inflicting 3,500 casualties and destroying over 120 aircraft.

1990 - East and West Germany agree on July 2 as the date for economic union, a prelude to full political unification.

2004 - A UN plan to reunite Cyprus collapses when Greek Cypriots overwhelmingly reject it in a referendum.

2009 - Mexico shuts down schools, museums, libraries and state-run theaters across its over-crowded capital in hopes of containing a swine flu outbreak that authorities say killed at least 20 people.

2011 - A civil rights group says at least 500 people died in religious rioting that followed Nigeria’s presidential election.

2012 - President Barack Obama marks the anniversary of the massacre of Armenians in Turkey nearly a century ago by calling it a “one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.”

2013 – A building collapses near Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing 1,129 people and injuring 2,500 others.

2014 - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accuses  the United States of being behind the political upheaval in Ukraine.

2015 - Former CIA Director David Petraeus, whose career was destroyed by an extramarital affair with his biographer, is sentenced to two years’ probation and fined $100,000 for giving her classified material while she was working on the book.  — AP/REUTERS/VNS