1478 - Guiliano de Medici is killed during mass at the cathedral in Florence in an unsuccessful coup attempt by the Pazzi family against the Medicis.

1607 - Captain John Smith lands at Cape Henry, Virginia, with the first group of colonists to establish a permanent English settlement in America.

1937 - In the Spanish civil war, German planes bomb the town of Guernica, killing between 1,000 to 1,650 people. Painter Pablo Picasso later immortalized their suffering in one of his masterpieces.

1986 - The world's worst nuclear accident occurs at the Chernobyl plant in the Soviet Union when a reactor meltdown in a power plant exposes hundreds of thousands of civilians to dangerous radioactive material. Thirty-two people die immediately.

1990 - Leftist Colombian presidential candidate, Carlos Pizarro, is assassinated aboard Colombian airliner. A drug cartel claims and later denies responsibility.

1996 - After 16 days, Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon agree to a truce to end a blitz that had left more than 150 people dead and forced a half-million people to flee.

1997 - Banners of loyalty and life-size images of Saddam Hussein adorn Iraq's capital, as Iraqis begin seven days of festivities in celebration of his 60th birthday.

1998 - Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, a leading human rights activist in Guatemala, is bludgeoned to death two days after a report he compiled on atrocities during Guatemala's 36-year civil war was made public.

2002 - The U.N. Commission on Human Rights in its annual review of human rights censures Cuba's human rights policies but drops official condemnations of Russia and Iran.

2005 - Syria's last soldier in Lebanon walks across the border, a quiet end to a once indomitable 29-year military presence that was the key to Damascus' control of its neighbor.

2006 - European Union lawmakers announce findings that the CIA has conducted more than 1,000 clandestine flights in Europe since 2001, and some of them secretly took away terror suspects to countries where they could face torture.

Leonardo da Vinci, Italian painter, engineer, sculptor and architect (1452-1519); David Hume, Scottish philosopher-historian-economist (1711-1776); Alfred Krupp, German metallurgist-industrialist (1812-1887); W.F. Massey, New Zealand politician (1856-1925); Carol Burnett, U.S. actress (1934--); Giancarlo Esposito, U.S. actor (1958--); Joan Chen, Chinese actress (1961--).

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