On Palm Sunday, near the village of Towton in Yorkshire, Lancastrian and Yorkist armies clashed in blinding snow. Roughly 50,000 men fought, and by nightfall as many as 28,000 lay dead, making it the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. The Yorkist victory secured Edward IV's claim to the throne.

Following the slaughter at Towton, the deposed Lancastrian king Henry VI fled to Scotland with his queen, Margaret of Anjou. Edward IV's victory allowed him to consolidate Yorkist control over England, beginning a reign that, despite later interruptions, reshaped the balance of power among England's warring noble houses.

At age 20, Ranjit Singh took the title of Maharaja after consolidating control over Lahore and surrounding Sikh territories, founding the Sikh Empire. Over the following decades he built one of the most formidable indigenous military powers in South Asia, resisting both Afghan incursions and, for a time, British expansion.

Under the terms of the Paris Peace Accords signed two months earlier, the last U.S. combat forces withdrew from South Vietnam. Roughly 2,500 support personnel remained to guard installations, but the departure marked the end of America's direct combat role in a war that had killed over 58,000 U.S. service members and profoundly divided the nation.

Mariner 10 swept within 703 kilometers of Mercury's surface, becoming the first spacecraft to visit the planet and returning over 2,700 images that revealed a heavily cratered, moon-like world. The flyby also discovered Mercury's surprisingly strong magnetic field, a finding that puzzled scientists for decades given the planet's small size and slow rotation.

Wei Jingsheng, an electrician and writer who had posted essays calling for democracy and human rights on Beijing's famous Democracy Wall, was arrested by Chinese authorities. His essay 'The Fifth Modernization,' which argued that political democracy must accompany Deng Xiaoping's economic modernization drive, made him a target for a government unwilling to tolerate open dissent.

As NATO warplanes enforced a UN-mandated no-fly zone over Libya, representatives from more than 40 nations and organizations gathered in London to plot the political and military course of the intervention. The conference aimed to unify a fractured coalition and discuss support for Libya's opposition National Transitional Council, weeks after Gaddafi's crackdown on the 2011 uprising began.

An open letter signed by more than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, called for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, citing 'profound risks to society.' Published by the Future of Life Institute, the letter intensified global debate over the breakneck pace of generative AI development.