Today in history
79 — Mount Vesuvius erupts and buries Italian cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
410 — Rome is overrun by the Visigoths, an event that symbolises the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
1572 — The slaughter of French Protestants at the hands of Catholics begins in Paris.
1814 — British forces invade Washington and set fire to the Capitol and the White House.
1875 — Captain Matthew Webb becomes first to swim English Channel, in 21 hours 45 minutes.
1891 — Patent for the motion picture camera filed by Thomas Edison.
1932 — Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly nonstop across the United States, travelling from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey, in 19 hours.
1954 — President Getulio Vargas of Brazil kills himself with a gunshot to the heart rather than face forced retirement.
1968 — France explodes a hydrogen bomb at South Pacific testing ground and becomes world’s fifth thermonuclear power.
1976 — Two Soviet cosmonauts return to Earth after 48 days in orbit in space laboratory.
1981 — Mark David Chapman is sentenced in New York to 20-yearsto-life in prison for the murder of British rock star John Lennon.
1989 — Poland becomes the first Soviet-bloc country since the late 1940s to appoint a non-communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki.
1991 — Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as head of Communist Party and urges its leadership to disband the party.
1998 — The US and Britain agree to allow two Libyan suspects in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 to be tried by a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands.
2003 — New York State and City officials report that unidentifiable remains of more than 1000 victims of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre would be preserved in at Ground Zero.
2006 — Scientists from around the world approved a new definition of a planet, downgrading Pluto’s status to a ‘‘dwarf planet’’.
2009 — Scotland’s justice minister defends his much-criticised decision to free the Lockerbie bomber, as the US State Department says that though it disagrees ‘‘passionately’’ the move will not affect relations between America and Britain.
Today’s Birthdays: William Wilberforce, English statesman, philanthropist and reformer (1759-1833); William I of Orange, King of the Netherlands (1772-1843); Yasser Arafat, president of the Palestinian Council (1929-2004); Stephen Fry, British actor/writer (1957-); Rich Beem, US golfer (1970-).