Edward Teller, the "Father of the Hydrogen Bomb" and purported model for Dr. Strangelove, dies at the age of 95 at his home on the Stanford University campus. His role in the destruction of colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer's career during the McCarthy era resulted in his own ostracism by many of his peers.

A bomb planted by Chechen terrorists explodes in a Moscow apartment building on Guryanov Street, killing more than 90 people. It is part of a series of apartment bombings in Russia leaving more than 400 dead.

1,300 inmates riot inside the Attica Correctional Facility in western New York state, commandeering the prison and taking 40 guards hostage. The national guard stages an assault five days later, killing 42 people in the process (10 of them being captives).

Elvis Presley makes his first-ever appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, performing four songs for guest host Charles Laughton. Ed himself had vowed never to have Presley on his show, but Sullivan is at home, recuperating from a severe head injury.

On orders of Heinrich Himmler, Auschwitz prisoners are forced to exhume and burn 107,000 decaying corpses from the camp's mass graves. They are cremated in gigantic, open-pit bonfires.

William the Conqueror dies of internal injuries, sustained six weeks prior in a horse riding accident at Mantes-la-Jolie. When the corpulent king was later laid to rest in the foundations of a church, William's "swollen bowels burst, and an intolerable stench assailed the nostrils of the by-standers and the whole crowd."