On this day in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), successor to John Paul II, formally assumed his position as the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church during a mass in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City.
| 2003: | | Officials of North Korea informed U.S. diplomats that it had nuclear weapons and was making bomb-grade plutonium. |
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| 1967: | | Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov became the first man to die during a space mission when his spacecraft became entangled in its parachute during an attempted landing. |
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| 1949: | | | Communist forces occupied the Chinese capital, Nanking (Nanjing), after crossing the Yangtze River virtually unopposed by adherents to the Nationalist government under President Chiang Kai-shek. |
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| 1916: | | Members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army seized strategic points in Dublin during the Easter Rising, which heralded the end of British power in Ireland. |
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| 1904: | | | Painter Willem de Kooning, one of the leading exponents of Abstract Expressionism, was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands. |
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| 1898: | | | Spain declared war on the United States. |
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| 1877: | | War broke out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of the Serbo-Turkish War, resulting in independence for Serbia and Montenegro. |
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| 1792: | | French army officer Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle composed
"La Marseillaise,"
the French national anthem. |
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