Under international pressure, Syria withdraws the last of its 14,000 troop military garrison in Lebanon, ending its 29-year military domination of that country ( Syrian occupation of Lebanon ).

Robert Steinhäuser infiltrates and kills 17 at Gutenberg-Gymnasium in Erfurt, Germany before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot.

China Airlines flight 140 crashes at Nagoya Airport in Japan, killing 264 of the 271 people on board.

Physicists announce first evidence of the top quark subatomic particle.

Seventy tornadoes break out in the central United States. Before the outbreak's end, Andover, Kansas, would record the year's only F5 tornado (see Andover, Kansas Tornado Outbreak).

The deadliest tornado in world history strikes Central Bangladesh, killing upwards of 1,300, injuring 12,000, and leaving as many as 80,000 homeless.

A nuclear reactor accident occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), creating the world's worst nuclear disaster.

57 people are killed by former police officer Woo Bum-kon in a shooting spree in Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea.

The Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization enters into force

An earthquake of magnitude 7.5 destroys Tashkent.

A new government is formed in the Republic of Congo, led by Ambroise Noumazalaye.

A Rolling Stones concert in London, Ontario is shut down by police after 15 minutes due to rioting.

Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania.

In Libya, amendments to the constitution transform Libya (United Kingdom of Libya) into one national unity (Kingdom of Libya) and allows for female participation in elections.

NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.

Final run of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's ''Royal Blue'' from Washington, D.C., to New York City after 68 years, the first U.S. passenger train to use electric locomotives.

First container ship left Port Newark, New Jersey for Houston, Texas.

The Geneva Conference, an effort to restore peace in Indochina and Korea, begins.

World War II: Battle of Bautzen (1945)|Battle of Bautzen

Spanish Civil War: Guernica (or Gernika in Basque, Spain is bombed by German Luftwaffe.

The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established.

Los Angeles City Hall dedicated.

Paul von Hindenburg defeats Wilhelm Marx in the second round of the German presidential election to become the first directly elected head of state of the Weimar Republic.

American Civil War: Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrenders his army to General William Tecumseh Sherman at the Bennett Place near Durham, North Carolina.

Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia.

United States Marines captured Derne, Tripoli under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon.

Napoleon Bonaparte signs a general amnesty to allow all but about one thousand of the most notorious émigrés of the French Revolution to return to France, as part of a reconciliary gesture with the factions of the Ancien Regime and to eventually consolidate his own rule.

English colonists of the Jamestown settlement make landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia.

The Pazzi attack Lorenzo de' Medici and kill his brother Giuliano during High Mass in the Duomo of Florence.

Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) ascends Mont Ventoux