1931: Mukden seized by Japanese.
On this day in 1931, in the so-called Mukden Incident, the Japanese army in Manchuria used the pretext of an explosion along its railway to occupy Mukden and to increase its control, within three months, to all of Manchuria.
| 2001: | | For the second straight day, Typhoon Nari pounded Taiwan with record rainfalls, causing massive flooding and killing 79 people. |
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| 1965: | | Japanese astronomers Ikeya Kaoru and Seki Tsutomu discovered Comet Ikeya-Seki. |
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| 1948: | | A local communist commander seized power in Madiun, Indonesia, as part of a rebellion effort against the Sukarno government in an incident known as the Madiun Affair. |
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| 1932: | | By royal decree the dual kingdom of the Hejaz and Najd, along with its dependencies, was unified under the name of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. |
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| 1898: | | | British forces under Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener confronted French forces commanded by Jean-Baptiste Marchand at the disputed fort of Fashoda in the Egyptian Sudan. |
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| 1895: | | | Booker T. Washington declared the Atlanta Compromise—a classic statement on race relations—in a speech at the Atlanta (Georgia) Exposition. |
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| 1885: | | Bulgarian nationalists in Eastern Rumelia mounted a coup and declared the province's unification with Bulgaria, leading to the Serbo-Bulgarian War. |
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| 1819: | | | French physicist Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault, who introduced and helped develop a technique of measuring with extreme accuracy the absolute velocity of light and provided experimental proof that the Earth rotates on its axis, was born. |
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