24 April 1772

A building in the Savar Upazila of Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed, killing 1,134 people, making it the deadliest accidental structural failure in modern history.

A backhoe breached a pipeline in Toronto, Canada, which caused a gas explosion that killed seven people.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated a truck bomb in London's financial district in Bishopsgate, killing one person, injuring forty-four others, and causing damage that cost £350 million to repair.

Gruinard Island in Scotland, the site of biological warfare testing by British scientists, was declared free of anthrax after 48 years of quarantine.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched aboard STS-31 by Space Shuttle Discovery.

Cold War: The Dominican Civil War broke out due to tensions following a military coup against the democratically elected government of President Juan Bosch two years earlier.

World War II: The British Special Boat Service executed a successful raid to destroy an Axis radio station on the Greek island of Santorini.

Nazi Germany began its persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses by shutting down the Watch Tower Society office in Magdeburg.

An estimated 400 ramblers committed a wilful mass trespass of Kinder Scout (pictured) in the Peak District to highlight the denial of access to areas of open country in England.

The first portion of the Imperial Wireless Chain, a strategic international wireless telegraphy communications network created to link the countries of the British Empire, opened.

First World War: The Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux began, which contained the first instance of tanks fighting against each other.

The Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire began with the arrest and deportation of hundreds of prominent Armenians in Constantinople.

The Franck–Hertz experiment, the first electrical measurement to clearly demonstrate quantum mechanics, was presented to the German Physical Society.

The Woolworth Building in New York City officially opened; at the time, it was the tallest building in the world, with a height of 792 ft (241 m).

Realizing that the Russification of Lithuania was not working, the Russian Empire lifted the 40-year-old ban on publications written in Lithuanian language using the Latin alphabet.

German composer Max Bruch (pictured) conducted the premiere of his first violin concerto.

A fire broke out in Surat, India, which went on to destroy about 75% of the city.

The Library of Congress (building pictured), the de facto national library of the United States, was established as part of an act of Congress providing for the transfer of the nation's capital from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.

John Campbell released the first issue of The Boston News-Letter, the first continuously published newspaper in British North America.

A mass stabbing at a school in Nantes, France, leaves one person dead and three others wounded.

A building collapses near Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing 1,134 people and injuring about 2,500 others.

WikiLeaks starts publishing the Guantanamo Bay files leak.

Bombings in the Egyptian resort city of Dahab kill 23 people and injure about 80.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is inaugurated as the 265th Pope of the Catholic Church taking the name Pope Benedict XVI.