2016: 88,000 people were evacuated from their homes in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada as a wildfire ripped through the community, destroying approximately 2400 homes and buildings.
2007: The 4 year old British girl Madeleine McCann disappears in Praia da Luz, Portugal, starting "the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history".
2002: An Indian Air Force MiG-21 crashes into a bank in Jalandhar, killing eight and injuring 17.
2001: The United States loses its seat on the U.N. Human Rights Commission for the first time since the commission was formed in 1947.
2000: The sport of geocaching begins, with the first cache placed and the coordinates from a GPS posted on Usenet.
1999: The southwestern portion of Oklahoma City is devastated by an F5 tornado, killing forty-five people, injuring 665, and causing $1 billion in damage. The tornado is one of 66 from the 1999 Oklahoma tornado outbreak. This tornado also produces the highest wind speed ever recorded, measured at 301 +/- 20 mph (484 +/- 32 km/h).
1986: Twenty-one people are killed and forty-one are injured after a bomb explodes in an airliner (Flight UL512) at Colombo airport in Sri Lanka.
1978: The first unsolicited bulk commercial email (which would later become known as "spam") is sent by a Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative to every ARPANET address on the west coast of the United States.
1973: The 108-story Sears Tower in Chicago is topped out at 1,451 feet as the world's tallest building.
1948: The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Shelley v. Kraemer that covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities are legally unenforceable.
1947: New post-war Japanese constitution goes into effect.
1945: World War II: Sinking of the prison ships Cap Arcona, Thielbek and Deutschland by the Royal Air Force in Lübeck Bay.
1942: World War II: Japanese naval troops invade Tulagi Island in the Solomon Islands during the first part of Operation Mo that results in the Battle of the Coral Sea between Japanese forces and forces from the United States and Australia.
1921: West Virginia becomes the first state to legislate a broad sales tax, but does not implement it until a number of years later due to enforcement issues.