On February 28

The United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior officials.

Bus drivers in Greater Manchester began an eleven-week strike, one of the longest in British transportation history.

Benedict XVI became the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign from the papacy.

During a period of religious violence in Gujarat, India, mobs of Hindus attacked Muslims in Naroda Patiya and in Chamanpura, resulting in 166 deaths.

A high-speed train crash occurred near Selby in North Yorkshire, England, killing 10 and injuring 82.

Two 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.

GRB 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.

The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army launched a mortar attack on a Royal Ulster Constabulary station in Newry, Northern Ireland, killing nine people.

A London Underground train failed to stop at the terminal Moorgate station, crashing and causing the deaths of 43 people.

The British election ended in a hung parliament after the Liberal Party, under Jeremy Thorpe, achieved their highest ever number of votes.

Japanese police stormed a mountain lodge near Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, to end a ten-day siege by members of the paramilitary group United Red Army.

American test pilots Charles Bassett and Elliot See die in a plane crash in in St. Louis, Missouri.

Chicago alderman Benjamin F. Lewis was murdered in his office by unknown assailants two days after having been reelected.

Nationalist soldiers fired on protesters in Taipei (crowd pictured), triggering widespread uprisings and violent suppression in the White Terror.

In one of the most famous errors in lexicography, the erroneous word dord was discovered in Webster's New International Dictionary by an editor.

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.

In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, Greeks living in southern Albania proclaimed the short-lived Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus.

The most successful football club in Portugal, S.L. Benfica (first team pictured), was founded in Lisbon as Sport Lisboa.

Ranavalona III (pictured), the last sovereign ruler of the Kingdom of Madagascar, was deposed by French military forces.

USS 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.