Today in history
1556 — Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer is burned at the stake as a heretic.
1829 — Earthquake in Spain kills 6000.
1831 — Austrian troops enter Italy to put down revolt.
1917 — Tsar Nicholas II and his family are arrested by revolutionary forces in Russia.
1918 — The Second Battle of the Somme, the last German offensive in World War I, begins.
1919 — Soviet Republic is proclaimed; A pro-soviet coup headed by Bela Kun overthrows the government of Hungary.
1953 — Sudan achieves selfgovernment.
1960 — Almost 70 people are killed and more than 180 wounded when South African police fire on a peaceful black demonstration against pass laws at Sharpeville in the Transvaal.
1979 — The Egyptian Parliament unanimously approves a peace treaty with Israel.
1985 — Death of British actor Sir Michael Redgrave; Police in Langa, South Africa, fire on blacks marching to mark the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville shootings, killing at least 21.
er (The Piano) and Tom Hanks (Philadelphia) win the acting honours; US actor Macdonald Carey dies in California, aged 81.
1996 — Russian forces launch air and artillery attacks on villages in western Chechnya.
1997 — At a summit in Helsinki, Finland, US President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin agree to slash their nuclear arsenals.
2004 — Afghanistan’s civil aviation minister Mirwais Sadiq is killed in an ambush in Herat.
2005 — A US high school student shoots dead nine and then kills himself at Minnesota’s Red Lake Indian Reservation.
2010 — Thirteen Afghan civilians die in violence as the nation’s hardline vice president expresses hopes for reconciliation and representatives of a militant group with ties to the Taliban bring their own draft of a peace deal to the capital.
2014 — Russia formally annexes Crimea and the European Union pulls Ukraine closer into its orbit, deepen the divide between East and West.
2016 — Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says he will bring back both houses of parliament for an extraordinary sitting in April to deal with industrial-relations legislation, and vows to hold a double-dissolution election if the bills are not passed. TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS Roger Hodgson, British musician of Supertramp fame (1950-); Gary Oldman, British actor (1958-); Ayrton Senna, Brazilian Formula One racing driver (1960-1994); Matthew Broderick, US actor (1962-)