Eighty-eight year-old James Wenneker von Brunn opens fire inside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and fatally shoots Museum Special Police Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns. Other security guards returned fire, wounding von Brunn, who was apprehended.

The Spirit rover is launched, beginning NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission.

Pope John Paul II canonizes Lebanon's first female saint, Saint Rafqa.

Dr. Robert Smith takes his last drink, and Alcoholics Anonymous is founded in Akron, Ohio, United States, by him and Bill Wilson.

League of Prizren is established, to oppose the decisions of the Congress of Berlin and the Treaty of San Stefano, as a consequence of which the Albanian lands in the Balkans were being partitioned and given to the neighbor states of Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Greece.

The Jardin des Plantes museum opens in Paris. A year later, it becomes the first public zoo.