Today in history
1520 — King Christian II of Denmark and Norway defeats Swedes at Lake Asunden and subsequently conquers Sweden.
1788 — HMS Supply, first ship of Britain’s First Fleet to Australia, reaches Botany Bay.
1913 — Greek and Turkish naval forces battle off Tendos Isle.
1919 — The World War I Peace Congress opens in Versailles, France.
1936 — Author Rudyard Kipling dies in England.
1945 — Soviet troops relieve Leningrad after a 16-month German siege.
1952 — Anti-british riots break out in Egypt.
1968 — United States and Soviet Union agree on draft treaty to control nuclear weapons.
1977 — Australia’s worst rail crash, at Granville, Sydney, kills 83 when a train hits a concrete bridge.
1990 — Right-wing gunman wounds Nagasaki’s mayor, who said late Emperor Hirohito bore partial responsibility for World War II.
1992 — More than 100,000 people attend Kenya’s first legal antigovernment rally in 22 years.
1996 — Lisa Marie Presley-jackson files for divorce from Michael Jackson.
1999 — Brazil lets its currency float freely, opting to use austerity measures to keep spending in check.
2002 — The Sierra Leone government declares that the country’s 11-year-old civil war, which killed about 50,000 people — mostly civilians — over.
2003 — Four people die and almost 500 homes are destroyed when bushfire takes thousands of Canberrans by surprise.
2005 — Airbus launches the A380, hailed as the largest civil airliner ever built, capable of carrying up to 800 passengers.
2007 — A woman who disappeared in the jungles of northeastern Cambodia as a child is found 19 years later.
2012 — Italians tally 11 dead, 21 missing from the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster.
2015 — A record six million people attend a Mass celebrated by Pope Francis in the Philippine capital Manila; During a one-day international at the MCG, Australian cricketer Dave Warner tells Indian batsman Rohan Sharma to ‘‘speak English’’; Australian golfer Robert Allenby reportedly bashed, robbed and kidnapped in Hawaii.
2016 — Peter Leahy, the former chief of the Australian army from 2002 to 2008, says its important for Australian troops to remain in Afghanistan.
Today’s Birthdays: Francois Michel Detellier, French statesman (1641-1691); Edmund Barton, Australia’s first prime minister (1849-1920); Alan Alexander Milne, Winnie-the- Pooh author (1882-1956);