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On this day in history

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(Reuters) -- 1908: Bulgaria proclaims its independence from the Ottoman Empire.

1910: Portugal is declared a republic after a successful revolt against King Manuel II.

1914: French and German planes exchange fire at the start of World War One in one of the earliest aerial battles.

1947: U.S. President Harry Truman delivers the first live White House televised address.

1964: Fifty-seven East German refugees shelter in West Berlin after the tunneling under the Berlin Wall. It was the greatest mass escape since the wall was built in 1961.

1983: Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa wins the Noble Peace Prize.

1995: UK envoy Richard Holbrooke clinched a cease-fire agreement among warring factions in Bosnia.

1998: The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee approved launching a formal impeachment inquiry against President Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

2000: Demonstrators storm the Yugoslav parliament building in Belgrade and opposition leader Vojislav Kostunica tells a huge rally that President Slobodan Milosevic has been defeated.

2001: Emilie Schindler, who with her husband Oskar helped hundreds of Jews escape Nazi death camps in World War Two, dies.

2002: The last of 21, 666 Rwandan troops leave the Democratic Republic of Congo, lifting hopes of peace in Africa's Great Lakes region.

2003: Akhmad Kadyrov, a former Muslim cleric backed by the Kremlin, wins Chechnya's presidential elections by a landslide. He was assassinated in May 2004.

2004: US scientists Frank Wilczek, David Gross and David Politzer win the Noble physics prize for explaining the basic building blocks of nature, quarks, interact.

2004: Noble laureate Maurine Wilkins, the British scientist who played a key role in the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, dies. He was 88. He was awarded Noble prize for Medicine in 1962 with Francis Crick and James Watson.

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