1944 – Fatos Kongoli, Albanian writer and mathematician, was born in Elbasan. Kongoli studied mathematics, partly in Beijing, partly in Tirana, where he graduated in 1967. He worked for a long time as a literary journalist and editor at the “Naim Frashëri” Publishing House. He is the author of a series of books. Congolese books have been published in several countries around the world. He is the winner of the “Balkanika” international award. He is also the winner of the highest literary award in Albania “Penda e Artë” (2004). The Association of Albanian Publishers awarded him the “Writer of the Year” award for 2006, while the novel “The Skin of the Dog”, translated into German, was announced as the book of the month of June 2006 in Germany. In 2016, he was declared the “Best Writer of the Year” by the “Harpa” Cultural Foundation. The novel “Little Liars” announced him Author of the year 2019 at two international book fairs, in Fier and Prishtina.
1945 – During World War II, the Soviet Red Army begins the Vistula-Oder offensive. The Vistula-Oder Offensive was a successful Red Army operation on the Eastern Front. During this offensive, the cities of Krakow, Warsaw and Poznan were taken. In this military campaign, nearly 300,000 Soviet troops and over 100,000 Germans were killed.
1949 – Born in Kyoto, Haruki Murakami. Murakami is a Japanese writer. His books and stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally. His works have been translated into 50 languages, and selling millions of copies outside his native country. He has received numerous awards such as the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize.
1964 – Rebels in Zanzibar begin a revolt known as the Zanzibar Revolution, and declare a Republic in the country. The revolution took place in 1964 and led to the overthrow of the Sultan of Zanzibar and his predominantly Arab government by local African revolutionaries. Zanzibar was an ethnically diverse country that was granted independence from Britain in 1963.
1971 – The Harrisburg Six, Philip Berrigan and five other activists are charged with plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger and attempting to blow up the heating tunnels of federal buildings in Washington, D.C. The group was prosecuted for alleged criminal plots during the Vietnam War. All of them were Catholic nuns and priests.
1976 – Agatha Christie dies aged 85. Christie, was an English writer. She is known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, especially those starring her fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Christie also wrote the world’s longest novella, a murder mystery, The Mousetrap.
1990 – A seven-day pogrom breaks out against the Armenian civilian population in Baku, Azerbaijan. During this ethnic cleansing, the Armenians were tortured, killed, and expelled from the city. The pogrom of the Armenians in Baku was one of the acts of ethnic violence in the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, directed against the Armenians of Karabakh to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia.
2010 – A magnitude 7 Mercalli earthquake in Haiti kills over 100,000 people and destroys most of the capital Port-au-Prince. The injured and homeless would be over 200,000. This earthquake would be one of the strongest and most destructive, not only in this country, but in the entire Western Hemisphere. The economic damage caused by this earthquake was 8.5 billion dollars.
