Milestones

Ten years ago: At least 20,000 East Berliners observed a minute of silence for those killed while attempting to flee over the Berlin Wall, the first such public mourning since Communists built the wall in 1961.

Five years ago: Francisco Martin Duran of Colorado Springs, Colo., fired more than two dozen shots from a rifle at the White House while standing on Pennsylvania Avenue; Duran was later convicted of trying to assassinate President Clinton and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

One year ago: Sen. John Glenn, at age 77, roared back into space aboard the shuttle Discovery, retracing the trail he’d blazed 36 years earlier. The government cleared the powerful drug tamoxifen as a way for healthy women at very high risk of breast cancer to cut their odds of getting a tumor.