Ten years ago: South African President Nelson Mandela capped his 80th birthday by marrying Graca Machel, the widow of a Mozambican president and black liberation leader.
Five years ago: Basketball star Kobe Bryant was charged with sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman at a Colorado spa; Bryant denied the charge, saying he was guilty only of adultery. (Prosecutors later dropped the case.) The body of British scientist David Kelly, a weapons expert at the center of a storm over British intelligence on Iraq, was found a day after he'd committed suicide.
One year ago: Senate Republicans torpedoed legislation to force the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq. An underground steam pipe exploded on a New York City street, swallowing a tow truck and claiming the life of a woman who suffered a heart attack. Armed men kidnapped two Germans and five Afghans working on a dam project in central Afghanistan. (One of the Germans, Ruediger Diedrich, was found shot dead three days later; the others were later released.) Opera tenor Jerry Hadley, 55, died at a hospital in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., a week after he'd shot himself with an air rifle.
Today In War
1863: Nearly half of the men in the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry, one of the first black U.S. Army regiments, are killed or wounded in an assault on Confederate Fort Wagner in South Carolina.
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