Today in history
1542 – King Henry VIII takes the title of King of Ireland.
1570 – Earl of Moray, Regent of Scotland, is assassinated.
1631 – France, under Treaty of Barwalde, undertakes to subsidise Sweden in Thirty Years’ War.
1789 – Georgetown University is established in present-day Washington.
1799 – French troops capture Italian city of Naples.
1855 – A magnitude 8.2 earthquake strikes Wellington, raising the harbour and providing flat land which the city’s CBD is subsequently built on; nine deaths are reported from across the lower North Island.
1878 – Britain’s cabinet sends fleet to Constantinople at Sultan Abdulhamid II’S request.
1913 – Nazim Pasha is murdered in Turkish coup, and Shevket Pasha forms ministry.
1945 – Soviet forces reach Oder River in World War II.
1950 – The Knesset proclaims Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
1989 – Civilian commandos and army troops backed by tanks battle at infantry base on outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
1991 – The Angolan government accepts a peace plan that ends 15-year- old civil war with UNITA rebels.
1994 – Gunmen believed to be leftist guerrillas fire at a gathering of political rivals in northwest Colombia, killing at least 35 people.
1995 – An opposition party leader is shot to death in Spain’s Basque region, another apparent victim of separatist violence.
1998 – Pakistani Mir Aimal Kasi is sentenced to death in Fairfax, Virginia, for a politically motivated ambush outside the headquarters of the CIA that left two men dead. He is executed in Nov. 2002.
2001 – A new administration in the Philippines moves to freeze the bank accounts of ousted President Joseph Estrada and begins a criminal investigation against him.
2002 – A previously unknown militant group kidnaps Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal newspaper, in Karachi, Pakistan. Pearl, who had been working on a story about Islamist militant groups in that country, is later killed.
2008 – Tens of thousands of Gazans flood into Egypt through a border fence blown up by militants – puncturing a gaping hole in Israel’s air-tight closure of the Gaza Strip and giving a boost to Hamas militants.
2012 – France’s parliament votes to make it a crime to deny that the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks nearly a century ago constituted a genocide, risking more sanctions from Turkey and complicating an already delicate relationship with the rising power.
Today’s Birthday: Mariska Hargitay, US actress (1964–).