Venezuelan crisis of 1902–1903, in which Britain, Germany and Italy impose a naval blockade on Venezuela in order to enforce collection of outstanding financial claims.
The first large scale use of poison gas by both sides in World War I occurs, first by the Germans at the Battle of Humin-Bolimów on the eastern front, and at the Second Battle of Ypres on the western front, and then by the British at the Battle of Loos.
April 13: The Jallianwala Bagh massacre in northern India: Acting Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer orders troops of the British Indian Army to fire their rifles into a crowd of unarmed Indian civilians, killing from 379 to 1,000 people and injuring another 1,500.
October 14: Germany announces its withdrawal from the League of Nations and the World Disarmament Conference, after the U.S., the U.K. and France deny its request to increase its defense armaments under the Versailles Treaty.
December 13: The Nanjing Massacre begins, ending about a month later in January 1938. It results in from 40,000 to 300,000 deaths according to various estimates.
June 15: Hungarian newspaper editor László Bíró fills a British patent of the first commercially successful ballpoint pen. This would popularize the instrument, currently the most widely used for writing, after World War II.
June 25: Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union begins. Siege of Tobruk in North Africa is the first major defeat for Hitler's land forces.
November – December: Three Bell Labs engineers give the first public demonstration of the transistor, an electrical component that could control, amplify, and generate current.
July 1: Colombo Plan, a regional organisation of 27 countries designed to strengthen economic and social development of member countries in the Asia-Pacific region, commences.
November 1: The United States successfully detonates the first hydrogen bomb, codenamed "Ivy Mike", at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific Ocean, with a yield of 10.4 megatons.
March 21: The Sharpeville Massacre, in which the police opened fire against a protesting crowd at a police station in the South African township of Sharpeville in Transvaal, resulting in 69 deaths and 180 injuries.
April 21: Construction of Brasília, Brazil's new capital, finished.
May 25: In an address to Congress, John F. Kennedy declares the United States' objective of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" by the end of the decade. This would be in fact achieved by the Apollo Project, despite several challenges and much doubt.
October 21: The Aberfan disaster, the catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip (pile of waste coal mining material) in Aberfan, Wales results in 144 deaths.
A 0 series Shinkansen high-speed rail set in Tokyo, May 1967
April 21: Greek military coup establishes a military dictatorship led by Georgios Papadopoulos. The dictatorship ends in 1974.
June 5 – 10: The Six-Day War, a conflict between Israel and Arab states that resulted in Israel occupying the Gaza Strip, the Sinal Peninsula, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.
Mid-year: Summer of Love, in which as many as 100,000 people, mostly young people sporting hippie fashions of dress and behavior, converged in San Francisco's neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury.
September – Zond 5 travels to the Moon with the first lifeforms to reach Earth's satellite
December – Apollo 8 orbits the Moon with three NASA astronauts, becoming the first human spaceflight mission to enter the gravitational influence of another celestial body.
Another new strain of a flu in Hong Kong spreads again.
May 8: The airplane serving Sabena Flight 571 from Brussels to Lod, Tel Aviv is hijacked by four members of the Black September Organization, a Palestinian terrorist group, resulting in 3 deaths and 3 injuries.
July 4: Operation Entebbe, a successful counter-terrorist hostage-rescue mission carried out by commandos of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at Entebbe Airport in Uganda.
November 19: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to visit Israel in the hopes of establishing peace between the two countries.
March 28: The Three Mile Island nuclear accident, a partial meltdown of reactor number 2 of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (TMI-2) in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, near Harrisburg, and subsequent radiation leak.
September 1: Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a scheduled flight from New York City to Seoul via Anchorage, Alaska, is shot down by a Soviet Su-15 interceptor, resulting in 269 fatalities and no survivors. This leads to the declassification of GPS development.
August 20: Beginning of the Iran–Contra affair, a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan Administration involving the sale of arms to the Khomeini government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
October 1: Release date of the Macintosh 128K, the first successful mass-market personal computer to feature a graphical user interface, built-in screen, and mouse.
November 13: The Armero tragedy, in which 20,000 people die following the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz stratovolcano in Tolima, Colombia.
June 10 – 29: The June Democratic Struggle, a nationwide pro-democracy movement in South Korea, leads to democratic reforms and an end to authoritarian rule.
December 20: The passenger ferry MV Doña Paz sinks after colliding with the oil tanker MT Vector 1 in the Tablas Strait in the Philippines, killing an estimated 4,000 people (history's worst peacetime maritime disaster).
January 2: Beginning of the perestroika ("restructuring"), a political movement for reformation within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the 1980s associated with Gorbachev and his glasnost ("openness") policy reform.
January 13: Lee Teng-hui takes control of Taiwan and oversee end of martial law and full democratization of island.
December 21: Pan Am Flight 103 is destroyed by a bomb and falls over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 people on-board, leaving no survivors, and 11 in town.
April – June: Tiananmen Square Massacre, in which troops armed with assault rifles and accompanied by tanks fired at student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, resulting in an undisclosed number of deaths (estimated in hundreds to thousands).
1989 Polish legislative election although the elections were not entirely democratic, they led to the formation of a government led by Tadeusz Mazowiecki and a peaceful transition to democracy in Poland and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe.
1989 Tiananmen Square protests. A crackdown takes place in Beijing on the army's approach to the square, and the final stand-off in the square is covered live on television.
June 5: An unknown Chinese protester, "Tank Man", stands in front of a column of military tanks on Chang'an Avenue in Beijing, temporarily halting them, an incident which achieves iconic status internationally through images taken by Western photographers.
July 1: President George H. W. Bush nominates the controversial Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court of the United States to replace Thurgood Marshall, who had announced his retirement.
The world's first GSM telephone call is made in Finland.
July 22: Tracy Edwards escapes Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment and flags down a police car and the cops search through Jeffrey's stuff and find photographs of dismembered bodies and other gruesome images, which finally leads to the arrest of Jeffrey Dahmer and ends his killing spree.
August 24 – 28: Hurricane Andrew kills 65 and causes $26.5 billion in damages in the Bahamas and the United States.
October 4: El Al Flight 1862, in which a Boeing 747 cargo aircraft of the then state-owned Israeli airline El Al crashes into the Groeneveen and Klein-Kruitberg flats in the Bijlmermeer neighbourhood of Amsterdam, resulting in 43 deaths.
February 28 – April 19: The Waco siege, the law enforcement siege of the compound that belonged to the Seventh-day Adventist religious sect Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas, carried out by the U.S. federal government, Texas state law enforcement, and the U.S. military, which results in a gunfight, a fire at the compound and 86 deaths.
March 20: The Tokyo subway sarin attack, an act of domestic terrorism perpetrated by members of the doomsday cult movement Aum Shinrikyo (now Aleph), in which they released sarin, an extremely toxic synthetic compound, in five coordinated attacks, resulting in 13 deaths and 6,252 injuries.
April 28 – 29: The Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, Australia leaves 35 people dead, leading to tighter gun regulations in Australia.
May 10: A sudden storm engulfsMount Everest with several climbing teams high on the mountain, leaving eight people dead. By the end of the month, at least four other climbers die in the worst season of fatalities on the mountain to date.
January – August: The Albanian civil unrest (Lottery Uprising), sparked by pyramid scheme failures, in which the government was toppled, with new parliamentary elections, and more than 2,000 people killed.
February 4: 1997 Israeli helicopter disaster, when two Israeli Air Force transport helicopters ferrying Israeli soldiers into Israel's security zone in southern Lebanon collided in mid-air, killing all 73 Israeli military personnel on board.
March 13: Island of Peace massacre, a mass murder attack that occurred at the Island of Peace on the Israeli-Jordanian border, in which 7 people were killed and 6 injured.
July 10: At least 218 people are killed, about 700 are missing and presumed dead, and about 800 shanties are buried in a collapse of a dumpsite, destabilized by torrential rains caused by tropical cyclones, in Payatas, Quezon City.
September 26: The Greek ferry Express Samina sinks off the coast of the island of Paros; 80 out of a total of over 500 passengers perish in one of Greece's worst sea disasters.
Morris, Richard B. and Graham W. Irwin, eds. Harper Encyclopedia of the Modern World: A Concise Reference History from 1760 to the Present (1970) online
^McMurray, Jonathan S. (2001). Distant ties: Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and the construction of the Baghdad Railway (1. publ ed.). Westport, Conn.: Praeger. p. 2. ISBN978-0-275-97063-5.
^Adalian, Rouben Paul (2013). "The Armenian Genocide". In Totten, Samuel; Parsons, William Spencer (eds.). Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts. Routledge. p. 121. ISBN978-0-415-87191-4.
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