1942 - Japanese troops take Java in World War II after heavy fighting against Dutch colonial forces and their british, Australian and US allies









1924 - Italy annexes the independent city of Fiume but abandons claims to Yugoslavia's Dalmatian coast.

1956 - Archbishop Makarios III, leader of the greek Cypriot movement for unification with Greece, is deported from Cyprus to the seychelles by the British colonial authorities, who accused him of supporting terrorism.

1976 -  Forty-two people die in Cavalese, Italy, in the world's worst cable car disaster. One teenage girl survives.

1991 - Yugoslavia deploys tank in Belgrade after clashes between riot police and anti-Comunist Protesters.

1992 - Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin dies. He shared the 1978 Nobel Prize with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt.

1995 - US President Bill Clinton approves a visa for Gery Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, political ally of the IRA guerrillas who fought to end british rule in Nothern Ireland, to enter the United States to raise funds.

1996 -  George Burns, one of America's best-loved and most enduring entertainers, dies week after his 100th birthday.

2002 - The Month Blanc Alpine tunnel reopens to car traffic after a fire in 1999 that killed 39 people.

2004 - Scientist unvell a picture of the universe taken by the Hubble Space that looked back up to 13 billion years to register galaxies formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

2005 - The spanish serial murdererAlfredo Galan, nick named the "playing card killer" because he left a card at the scene of  his crimes, receives jail senctences totaling 142 years.

2006 - Jhon Profumo, the goverment minister who in 1963 was at the center of one Britain's biggest political scandals, featuring a mix of high-society sex and cold war paranoia, dies aged 91.