1984
BBC News broadcast the first report on the Ethiopian famine, which led Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to release the Band Aid fund-raising single Do They Know its Christmas.

1983
Lebanese Civil War: terrorists drove a truck loaded with explosives into the US and French headquarters in Beirut, then detonated it in a suicide.
1958
Belgian cartoonist Peyo launched a new comic strip: ‘The Smurfs’ .
1942
Battle of El Alamein
1908
Birth of Ilya Frank, Russian physicist, Nobel Prize winner .

1865
Execution of George William Gordon, Jamaican assemblyman - an appalling example of colonial justice.

1739

1642
Battle of Edgehill
1641
50,000 Irish killed in an uprising in Ulster
1295
Signing of the 'Auld Alliance' in Paris between Scotland and France – one of the world's oldest mutual defence treaties
