1921 - Canadians Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin for the first time. It proved an effective treatment for diabetes.
1940 - The Battle of Britain began in WWII when at least 70 German bombers attacked docks in south Wales.
Foreign tourists who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 will not be allowed to enter Canada for quite some time, with the government unwilling to jeopardize progress made on containing the virus, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Thursday.
In the small seaside town of Blokhus in Denmark, the world’s tallest sandcastle has been completed, weighing nearly 5,000 tonnes and towering over 20 metres high, its designers said Wednesday.
A group of British lawmakers yesterday urged the government to take tougher action against China over its treatment of minority groups, including a partial Winter Olympics boycott and cotton trade ban.
A British parliamentary standards committee yesterday cleared Prime Minister Boris Johnson of breaching a lawmakers’ code of conduct over a luxury Caribbean holiday, but criticised his handling of the matter.
Chinese researchers want to send more than 20 of China's largest rockets to practice turning away a sizable asteroid - a technique that may eventually be crucial if a killer rock is on a collision course with Earth.
Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro said on Wednesday he may not accept the result of a presidential election next year unless the voting system, which uses computers to record votes, is replaced with printed ballots that he favors.
Asia Pacific naval forces kicked off the region's biggest sea defence exhibition in Singapore yesterday, highlighting the need to protect the world's key shipping lanes from extremist threats....
The death toll from a head-on smash between a passenger bus running on compressed natural gas and a chemical tanker rose to 29 yesterday, the Press Trust of India said.
Police told the news agency they had recovered 29 bodies and that another 14 people were injured in the accident, which occurred when the bus tried to overtake another vehicle on a highway in western Gujarat state Monday.
Six of the dead had been identified but most bodies were charred beyond recognition by the flames that engulfed the bus, police said.
Thirteen of the injured were being treated in local hospitals and three of them were in serious condition, the report said.
Russia said yesterday it had agreed to help build a light-water nuclear reactor and research centre in Myanmar, an Asian state run by a military junta that is under European and US economic sanctions.
"The agreement foresees cooperation in the design and equipping of a centre for nuclear research in Myanmar," including a light water nuclear reactor, Russia's atomic energy agency Rosatom said in a statement.
Rosatom head Sergei Kiriyenko and Myanmar's Science and Technology Minister U Thaung signed the deal for construction of the centre yesterday in Moscow, the statement said.
Interior minister Hani al-Qawasmeh resigned from the Palestinian unity government yesterday amid the deadliest factional fighting in two months in a major blow to the fledgling administration....
Eight Tamil Tiger rebels have been killed in fresh clashes in Sri Lanka's embattled northern and eastern regions, the defence ministry said yesterday.
Security forces killed seven rebels in the northern district of Vavuniya late Sunday in a gunbattle along their defence lines, the ministry said.
Ten people died overnight in an explosion and fire at a cafe in a market in Russia's southern Orenburg region overnight, Russian news agencies reported yesterday....
Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian yesterday appointed the island's top China negotiator as the new premier, urging him to be firm in his dealings with Beijing....
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned yesterday that Iran would retaliate severely to any possible attack by the United States over Tehran's controversial nuclear programme....
Two people were killed and 10 injured yesterday in a bomb attack at a crowded marketplace in India's insurgency-wracked northeastern state of Assam, police said.
Police said the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), a rebel group fighting for an independent Assamese homeland since 1979, was behind the attack in Guwahati.
"The impact of the blast was so powerful that it ripped apart four motorcycles parked in the area," a senior police official told AFP, saying the bomb was planted on a parked motorcycle.
