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| Event Description
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The 24 hour hostage standoff at a compound housing oil workers in the eastern city of Khobar, Saudi Arabia ends after Saudi forces storm the compound where the hostages are holed up. The attack claimed by Al Qaeda left at least 22 people dead. |
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About 100 Iraqi police leave the Iraqi city of Najaf despite the cease fire declared by the radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. The U.S coalition forces had hoped to transfer the security responsibility in Najaf to the Iraqi police. |
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Wael Nassar, head of Izzedine al Qassam, Hamas' military wing is killed when an Israeli Apache helicopter fires two rockets at his motorcycle in Gaza City. The strike kills a civilian another Hamas militant. |
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After the end of the hostage standoff in Khobar, Saudi Arabia officials vow to keep its crude supplies flowing to world markets, and pledge to improve security for oil producing facilities and employees. |
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Three U.S. Marines are killed in action in the volatile al-Anbar province west of Baghdad, while the U.S. Army confirms that a soldier was killed in a separate mortar attack several days earlier. |
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Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor fired by U.S. President Richard Nixon for refusing to curtail his Watergate investigation dies at the age 92. |
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Mass riots erupt across Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, following the assassination of Sunni Cleric Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai. While harshly critical of the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he was considered a religious moderate. |
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Iraqi insurgants ambush a U.S patrol with small arms fire, killing one U.S. soldier, and fired a rocket-propelled grenade on a tank, killing another U.S soldier. |
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The White House announces that George W. Bush keeps the pistol that Saddam Hussein held when soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division pulled him from his spiderhole. The soldiers who helped in Hussein's capture presented it to the president, who now keeps the gun in a study that adjoins the Oval Offic ... |
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Fugitive bombing suspect Eric Robert Rudolph is captured by a rookie cop in the town of Murphy, North Carolina. |
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The U.S. terror threat level lowered to yellow, or 'elevated.' |
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FBI warns law enforcement agencies that al Qaeda may have access to shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. |
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A 33-foot tall "Goddess of Democracy" statue is unveiledby student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, People's Republic of China. |
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Five men calling themselves the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan walk into the Iranian Embassy in London and take the occupants captive. |
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Three members of the Japanese Red Army conduct a terrorist attack on Lod Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Kozo Okamoto, Tsuyoshi Okudaira, and Yasuyuki Yasuda manage to kill twenty-four people and injured seventy-eight others |
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NASA launches Mariner 9 on a mission to Mars. The probe will become the first spacecraft to orbit another planet. It returns eye-opening photographs of the Mars landscape, including massive extinct volcanoes and a system of canyons over 4,000 kilometers long. |
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Egypt and Jordan sign a mutual defense treaty. |
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1000 RAF bombers drop more than 2000 tons of bomb on the city of Cologne in a 90 minute raid which destroys more than 200 factories. |
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Germany captures the Greek Island of Crete through an airborne invasion called Operation Merkur. In the end, 6,600 German soldiers, including one in four paratroopers, lay dead on the battlefield. Allied soldiers were evacuated by the Royal Navy between the 28th and 31rst of May |
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The Lincoln Memorial is dedicated in Washington, DC. The former President's only surviving child, Robert Todd Lincoln, is in attendance. Daniel Chester French's sculpture of Lincoln is presented in the Memorial designed by Henry Bacon. |
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German forces commanded by Eric Ludendorff reach the Marne. |
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Wilbur Wright dies suddenly of typhoid fever. |
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Ray Harroun becomes the first winner of The Indianapolis 500, a 500-mile auto race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Indiana, USA. |
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U.S. troops arrive in Beijing to help put down the Boxer Rebellion. |
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Twelve people die in a stampede caused by a rumor that the newly-opened Brooklyn Bridge was going to collapse. |
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The corrupt and incompetent Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abd-ul-Aziz, is deposed to the joy of the Turkish people. He is succeeded by his nephew Murat V |
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Spanish Armada completes its departure from the Port of Lisbon and heads for the Engllish Channel. |
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Spanish Explorer Hernando de Soto lands at Tampa Bay with 600 cavaliers, both Spanish and Portuguese, in search of gold. De Soto's party would wander fruitlessly for four years in their quest, misled by Native Americans deeper into the wilderness. |
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Henry VIII weds Jane Seymour. |
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English burn the 19 year-old Joan of Arc at the stake in Rouen, France during the Hundred Years War. Heretics at the time could not receive a Christian burial, and Joan's remains were cast into the Seine River. |
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May 30