• Severe flooding in Yemen caused by Deep Depression ARB 02 (pictured) kills 58 and displaces 20,000.
• A bomb attack in Zagreb, Croatia kills Ivo Pukanić, the owner of the newspaper Nacional.
• The Indian Space Research Organisation successfully launches Chandrayaan-1, an unmanned lunar exploration mission.
• Several additional amino acids are found in vials from the 1953 Miller–Urey experiment that probed the origin of life.
• The United Nations General Assembly elects Turkey, Austria, Japan, Uganda, and Mexico to two-year terms on the Security Council.

• ... that AMiBA (pictured) is a radio telescope located on Mauna Loa in Hawaii that is being used to observe the Cosmic Microwave Background and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect in clusters of galaxies?
• ...that although the official government death toll of the 1997 Ardabil earthquake was given as 965 deaths, rescue workers at the scene claimed it was as much as three times higher?
• ... that Tang Dynasty general Li Na was, at one point, reduced to tears when he was under siege by another general, Liu Qia?
• ... that four of the candidates for either Governor or Lt. Governor in the 2008 American Samoa gubernatorial elections have ancestral ties to the Manu'a Islands?

• 1597 – Imjin War: About twelve Korean ships commanded by Admiral Yi Sun-sin defeated a large Japanese invasion fleet of at least 300 at the Battle of Myeongnyang in the Myeongnyang Strait. against waves of Japanese attackers during the Battle of Shanghai.
• 2001 – U.S. President George W. Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act into law, significantly expanding the authority of U.S. law enforcement agencies in fighting terrorism in the United States and abroad.
• 2002 – Approximately 40 Chechen rebels and 130 hostages died when Russian forces stormed a theater building in Moscow to end a four-day hostage siege.

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was an American sociologist, historian and civil rights activist. The first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. He rose to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks, and was one of the co-founders of the NAACP in 1909. He wrote one of the first scientific treatises in the field of American sociology, and published three autobiographies. Black Reconstruction in America (1935) challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that blacks were responsible for the failures of the Reconstruction era. On August 28, 1963, a day after his death, his book The Souls of Black Folk was highlighted by Roy Wilkins at the March on Washington, and hundreds of thousands of marchers honored him with a moment of silence. A year later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, embodying many of the reforms for which he had campaigned his entire life, was enacted. This gelatin silver print of Du Bois was taken in 1907 by the American photographer James E. Purdy, and is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.