Today in history
1789 – The US War Department establishes a regular army with a strength of several hundred men.
1829 – London’s reorganised police force, which becomes known as Scotland Yard, goes on duty.
1923 – Britain begins ruling Palestine under a League of Nations mandate.
1972 – China and Japan normalise relations.
1978 – Pope John Paul I is found dead in his Vatican apartment just over a month after becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.
1988 – The space shuttle Discovery blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, marking America’s return to manned space flight following the Challenger disaster.
1991 – Explosion rocks Georgia’s broadcasting centre that is held by opponents of the republic’s president Zviad Gamsakhurdia.
1992 – Brazilian lawmakers impeach President Fernando Collor de Mello.
1994 – Prodded by the United States, NATO allies agree to intensify retaliatory air strikes in Bosnia.
1996 – Bosnia’s first postwar elections are watched by international groups that certify victories by nationalist parties and the new president, Alija Izetbegovic.
1998 – The bodies of 15 ethnic Albanians, shot in the head and mutilated, are shown to diplomats and journalists in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, raising the likelihood of military intervention.
1998 – The New Zealand parliament passes legislation confirming a $170 million Treaty of Waitangi settlement for South Island iwi Ngai Tahu.
2002 – The United Nations World Food Program says it is cutting off grain rations to three million North Koreans because of a shortfall in food aid from donor nations.
2004 – The Vatican, in its first speech ever to the UN General Assembly’s annual autumn session for world leaders, calls for a total ban on human cloning and criticises the war in Iraq and unilateral responses to terrorism.
2005 – British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologises to an elderly activist who was ejected from the governing Labour Party’s conference for heckling a Cabinet minister over the Iraq war.
2006 – A Brazilian jetliner clips a smaller jet in midair and crashes into the Amazon jungle, killing all 155 on board in the nation’s worst air disaster.
2013 — The death toll from a building that collapsed in Mumbai rises to 60 as the rescue operation is called off.
Today’s Birthdays: Horatio Nelson, British admiral (1758-1805); Anita Ekberg, Swedish actress (1931–); Lech Walesa, Polish president and Nobel Peace Prize winner (1943–).