On This Day in History

The children's television series Sesame Street premiered in the United States.

In Angola, the MPLA decisively defeated the FNLA in the Battle of Quifangondo, while Portugal simultaneously withdrew all its colonial and military personnel from Luanda.

SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior, claiming all 29 of her crew's lives.

Writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People were executed by the Nigerian military regime led by Sani Abacha.

Nadarajah Raviraj, a prominent Sri Lankan Tamil politician and human rights lawyer, was assassinated in Colombo.

At the Ibero-American Summit in Santiago, Chile, King Juan Carlos I of Spain asked Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez "Why don't you shut up?" after Chávez repeatedly interrupted a speech by Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

A skirmish occurred between South Korean and North Korean naval ships off Daecheong Island in the Yellow Sea.

The British government announced that it had removed the last land mine from the Falkland Islands, laid by Argentine forces during the 1982 Falklands War.