The king of Portugal, Carlos I, and his heir, Luis Filipe, are shot as they ride in an open carriage in Lisbon

Anatole France casts a satirical eye on human society in his novel L'Île des pingouins ("Penguin Island")

UK prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman resigns because of ill health and is followed as Liberal leader and prime mininster by Herbert Asquith

David Lloyd George becomes chancellor of the exchequer in Asquith's new cabinet

Austria annexes Bosnia-Herzegovina, in response to the policy of the Young Turks in Istanbul

Sergei Diaghilev presents Fyodor Chaliapin in Boris Godunov at the Paris Opera

The Liberal government in Britain introduces an old-age pension, albeit only five shillings a week.

Georges Braque's Houses at L'Estaque introduces analytic Cubism

Claude Debussy completes Children's Corner, pieces for piano which include 'Golliwog's Cake Walk'

International outrage at Congo atrocities forces Belgium to annexe King Leopold's private colony

German physicist Hans Geiger, working in England with Rutherford, develops an instrument that can detect and count alpha particles

Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird is performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in a production by Stanislavsky

Bronislava Nijinska joins her brother Vaslav in the Maryinsky company in St Petersburg

After first being discussed at the Berlin Radiotelegraphic Conference in 1906, SOS is formally ratified as the international distress signal

Swiss chemist Jacques Brandenberger patents cellophane, a flexible transparent film made from cellulose

Modernist architect Adolf Loos attacks architectural ornament in Ornament and Crime

Arnold Schoenberg abandons tonality in his String Quartet No. 2

Alexander Scriabin's orchestral work, Poem of Ecstasy, has its first performance in New York

Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria declares his country's independence from Ottoman rule and calls himself Tsar Ferdinand I

Europe's worst earthquake, centred on the Strait of Messina, kills up to 200,000 people in Sicily and southern Italy.

The French critic Louis Vauxcelles describes Braque's latest landscapes as being composed of cubes, resulting in the term cubism

The Welsh poet W.H. Davies has a success with The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, his account of life on the road and in dosshouses

Bernard Leach moves to Japan to study oriental traditions in the graphic arts

The opera Elektra, the first collaboration between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, has its premiere in Dresden

Michel Fokine becomes the choreographer for the ballet company that Sergei Diaghilev is taking to Paris