Today in history
332 BC - Death of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, aged 62.
1573 - Peace of Constantinople ends war between Turkey and Venice.
1793 - France declares war on Spain, and Spanish forces invade Roussillon and Navarre.
1809 - Pioneer balloonist Jeanpierre Francois Blanchard dies in Paris, a year after he had a heart attack and fell from his balloon at The Hague.
1820 - Spain’s King Ferdinand II is forced to restore the Constitution of 1812 and end the Inquisition.
1854 - A sewing machine that could stitch buttonholes is patented by Charles Miller of St. Louis.
1876 - Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his telephone.
1918 - The Bolsheviks change their name to the Russian Communist Party.
1926 - The first successful transatlantic radio-telephone conversation takes place, between New York City and London.
1941 - British troops invade Italianoccupied Abyssinia - now Ethiopia - in World War II.
1951 - Iran’s Prime Minister Ali Razmara is assassinated.
1965 - A march by US civil rights demonstrators is broken up in Selma, Alabama, by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse.
1991 - Forces loyal to President Saddam Hussein reportedly execute as many as 400 people in southern Iraq following days of rebellion in Basra and other cities.
2005 - A fire set by rioting gang members kills 134 inmates of a provincial jail in the Dominican Republic, where overcrowded cells are overrun with rats, cockroaches and bedbugs.
2006 - A series of coordinated bombings rock a packed railway station and crowded temple in Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city, killing 20 people and injuring dozens in an attack that raised fears of communal violence.
2007 - A Garuda Airlines Boeing 737-400 burst into flames after careening off a runway in Indonesia’s Yogyakarta on Java island, killing at least 21 people. Investigators said the jetliner’s front wheels had snapped off as it touched down.
2013 - The UN Security Council votes unanimously for tough new sanctions to punish North Korea for its nuclear test, and Pyongyang threatens a nuclear strike against the U.S.
2014 - Hard-line militants turn Syria’s devastated eastern city of Raqqa into the nucleus of their vision for the Islamic caliphate they hope to establish in Syria and Iraq. Today’s Birthdays: Sir John Herschel, English astronomer (1792-1871); Anna Magnani, Italian actress (1908-1973); Rachel Weisz, British actress (1971-).