The United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior officials.
28 February 331
A Saturday in history
Weekday
Saturday
Season
Winter (N. Hemisphere)
Century
4th century
Records
220
- 2026
2021Bus drivers in Greater Manchester began an eleven-week strike, one of the longest in British transportation history.
2013Benedict XVI became the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign from the papacy.
2002During a period of religious violence in Gujarat, India, mobs of Hindus attacked Muslims in Naroda Patiya and in Chamanpura, resulting in 166 deaths.
2001A high-speed train crash occurred near Selby in North Yorkshire, England, killing 10 and injuring 82.
1997GRB 970228, a highly luminous 80-second flash of gamma rays, was detected on Earth, providing early evidence that gamma-ray bursts occur well beyond the Milky Way.
1997Two heavily armed bank robbers exchanged gunfire with officers of the Los Angeles Police Department in North Hollywood, in one of the most intense gun battles in American police history.
1985The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army launched a mortar attack on a Royal Ulster Constabulary station in Newry, Northern Ireland, killing nine people.
1975A London Underground train failed to stop at the terminal Moorgate station, crashing and causing the deaths of 43 people.
1974The British election ended in a hung parliament after the Liberal Party, under Jeremy Thorpe, achieved their highest ever number of votes.
1972Japanese police stormed a mountain lodge near Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, to end a ten-day siege by members of the paramilitary group United Red Army.
1966American test pilots Charles Bassett and Elliot See die in a plane crash in St. Louis, Missouri.
1963Chicago alderman Benjamin F. Lewis was murdered in his office by unknown assailants two days after having been reelected.
1947Nationalist soldiers fired on protesters in Taipei (crowd pictured), triggering widespread uprisings and violent suppression in the White Terror.
1939In one of the most famous errors in lexicography, the erroneous word dord was discovered in Webster's New International Dictionary by an editor.
- 1928
Indian physicist C. V. Raman and his colleagues discovered what is now known as Raman scattering, for which he later became the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
1914In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, Greeks living in southern Albania proclaimed the short-lived Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus.
1904The most successful football club in Portugal, S.L. Benfica (first team pictured), was founded in Lisbon as Sport Lisboa.
1897Ranavalona III (pictured), the last sovereign ruler of the Kingdom of Madagascar, was deposed by French military forces.
1893USS Indiana, the lead ship of her class and the first battleship in the United States Navy comparable to foreign battleships of the time, was launched.
1874In one of the longest cases ever heard in an English court, the claimant in the Tichborne case was convicted of perjury for attempting to assume the identity of the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy.
- 1638
The National Covenant was formally adopted in opposition to proposed reforms to the Church of Scotland by King Charles I.
-202Rebel leader Liu Bang declared himself Emperor Gaozu of Han after overthrowing the Qin dynasty, the first imperial dynasty of China.
Photo archive
24 historic images from this day — tap to open the gallery.
What was life like?
Prices, jobs, food, music and everyday routine — the world as it felt to live in.
Sources & fact check
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