Person report

★05 Sep 1921
Popular American comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle attended a party during which a woman was fatally injured; although he was eventually acquitted of manslaughter, the trial's scandal derailed his career.

★07 Sep 1940
Second World War: The Luftwaffe changed their strategy in the Battle of Britain and began bombing London and other British cities and towns for more than 50 consecutive nights.

★04 Mar 1943
Roundup of more than 4,000 Jews in Bulgarian-occupied northern Greece; they were deported to Treblinka extermination camp where all were killed.

★22 Dec 1948
The Emergency Government of the Republic of Indonesia under chairman Sjafruddin Prawiranegara was established to counter Dutch attempts to re-assert colonial control.

★24 Dec 1953
On New Zealand's North Island, at Tangiwai, a railway bridge was damaged by a lahar and collapsed beneath a passenger train, killing 151 people.

★21 Mar 1960
Police in Sharpeville, South Africa, opened fire on a group of unarmed black demonstrators who were protesting pass laws, killing almost 70 people and wounding about 180 others.

★05 Nov 1967
A train derailed near Hither Green maintenance depot in London, killing 49 people and injuring 78 others.

★06 Jul 1971
As a result of his visits to several Asian communist countries, Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's leader gave a speech on a number of Neo-Stalinist and socialist realist ideals, which became known as the July Theses.

★13 Sep 1985
Super Mario Bros., one of the best-selling and most influential video games of all time, was first released for the NES in Japan.

★27 Aug 1990
American musician Stevie Ray Vaughan, one of the most influential guitarists in the revival of blues in the 1980s, was killed in a helicopter crash.

Historical data by Wikipedia Contributors CC BY-SA 3.0.