On This Day in History

A refusal by the Bristol Omnibus Company and the Transport and General Workers' Union to permit the employment of black bus crews led to a bus boycott in Bristol, England.

American forces completed a helicopter evacuation of U.S. citizens, South Vietnamese civilians and others from Saigon, just before North Vietnamese troops captured the city and ended the Vietnam War.

Sixteen monks and a nun of the Hindu organisation Ananda Marga were beaten to death and set on fire in Calcutta, India.

Riverdance was performed for the first time, as the interval act for the Eurovision Song Contest.

Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun whose apparitions of Jesus inspired the Catholic devotion to the Divine Mercy, was canonized by Pope John Paul II.

The New Yorker published an online article and photographs detailing accounts of torture and abuse by American military personnel of Iraqi prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

A Dutch man drove his car at high speed into a parade in an attempt to kill the Dutch royal family.

A bomb blast in Ürümqi, China, killed three people and injured 79 others.

A crowd crush killed 45 people during the annual pilgrimage to the tomb of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in Israel.