TODAY IN HISTORY:

Court refused appeal

In 1994, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the National Hockey League’s appeal of a lower court ruling that awarded retirees an estimated $45 million in surplus pension funds.

In 1995, Communist Vietnam was formally admitted to the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), a group founded in 1967 amid fears and tensions of the Cold War and at the height of war in Indochina.

In 1995, Mohawk leaders said they burned $10 million worth of marijuana growing on federally owned fields near the native community of Kanesatake to show they could control their own territory.

In 1998, Monica Lewinsky was granted full immunity from criminal prosecution in exchange for testifying about her alleged affair with U.S. President Bill Clinton.

In 1999, Pope John Paul said that hell is not a physical place but “a condition resulting from attitudes and actions which people adopt in this life.”

In 2002, the first wave of Canadian troops returned from Afghanistan (to Edmonton).

In 2002, Pope John Paul II said sexual abuse by priests “fills us all with a deep sense of sadness and shame,” his first public comment on the issue. The Pope was visiting Toronto for World Youth Day.

In 2003, the first tentative land claim agreement in British Columbia’s densely populated Lower Mainland was announced. The treaty would transfer ownership of the existing 290-hectare reserve, plus 427 hectares of provincial Crown land, located adjacent to the reserve, to the Tsawwassen. The band would gain governance rights over the area, save for 62 hectares that include parcels some distance away. As well, the band would receive $10.1 million in cash, commercial fishing rights and the right to petition for removal of some of its new land from the province’s agricultural land reserve.

In 2003, in a landmark decision, a B.C. Provincial Court judge ruled that native-only commercial salmon fisheries contravened the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms because it discriminates against other commercial fishermen on the basis of race.

In 2004, a massive car bomb killed at least 68 people outside a police station in Baqouba, about 50 kilometres north of Baghdad. More than 50 other people also died in violence in other parts of Iraq, making it the bloodiest day since the handover of sovereignty to the interim government a month earlier.

In 2005, the Irish Republican Army announced it was renouncing violence as a political weapon and resuming disarmament in a declaration designed to revive Northern Ireland's peace process.

In 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a sweeping energy bill that included an extra month of daylight saving time.

In 2007, Buckingham Palace announced the engagement of the Queen’s grandson, Peter Phillips, son of Princess Anne, to Autumn Kelly of Montreal. (They married on May 17, 2008.)

In 2009, courts in Ontario and the U.S. approved the sale of Nortel Network's wireless technology division to Sweden’s LM Ericsson. Ericsson earlier won the Nortel unit when it bid US$1.13 billion for the operation.

In 2010, amid monsoon rains and thick clouds, a passenger jet crashed into the hills overlooking Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad, killing all 152 people on board.

In 2010, a B.C. Supreme Court judge sentenced Kenneth Klassen to 11 years in prison in violation of Canada's rarely used sex-tourism law. He had videotaped himself having sex with girls as young as eight in Cambodia and Colombia between December 1998 and March 2002.

In 2010, German prosecutors charged 88-year-old Samuel Kunz, the world’s third most wanted Nazi suspect, for participating in the murder of 430,000 Jews at the Belzec death camp, where he allegedly served as a guard from January 1942 to July 1943. (He died on Nov. 18 before he could stand trial.)

In 2010, employees reported for work for the last time at the GM transmission plant in Windsor, Ont., ending a 90-year history in the border city near Detroit and putting 1,100 people out of work.

In 2015, 13-1 longshot Breaking Lucky held off Queen’s Plate winner and race favourite Shaman Ghost to capture the Prince of Wales Stakes at Fort Erie Racetrack, claiming the second jewel of the Canadian Triple Crown.