Today in history
1509 — Pope Julius II excommunicates the Italian state of Venice.
1521 — Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan is killed in the Philippines.
1828 — London Zoo opens in Regents Park.
1910 — Louis Botha and James Hertzog found the South African Party.
1912 — The Liberal Party wins 46 seats and power in Queensland under Premier Digby Denham.
1950 — Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies introduces a bill to outlaw the Communist Party.
1969 — Bolivian President Rene Barrientos Ortuno is killed in a helicopter crash.
1972 — US Apollo 16 spacecraft and three astronauts make a safe landing in the Pacific after a journey to the moon.
1976 — First Vietnamese refugee boatpeople arrive in Darwin.
1993 — Eritreans overwhelmingly choose independence from Ethiopia in a referendum.
1996 — Rwandan soldiers kill 38 people in retaliation for the slaying of one of their own in a northwestern Rwanda village two weeks earlier.
1997 — A Brazilian judge sentences a former police officer convicted of massacring 21 residents of a Rio de Janeiro slum to almost 450 years in prison, saying his actions ‘‘demeaned all values of human existence’’.
2000 — Palaeontologists unveil a two-million-year-old skull of a female Paranthropus robustus, a cousin of early man. The fossil was found in South Africa.
2004 — African National Congress’ Thabo Mbeki is inaugurated for a second term as South Africa’s president 10 years after its first all-race elections and the end of apartheid.
2010 — Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s pushes Greece to the brink of a financial abyss and also downgrades Portugal’s debt, fuelling fears of a continent-wide debt meltdown in Europe.
2014 — Two 20th-century popes who changed the course of the Roman Catholic church become saints as Pope Francis honours John XXIII and John Paul II in a delicate balancing act aimed at bringing together the conservative and progressive wings of the church; Scott Cam, presenter of the Nine Network’s The Block, wins the Gold Logie.
2016 — Seoul says the number of North Korean defectors arriving in South Korea has halved since Kim Jong-un came to power. Today’s Birthdays: Samuel Morse, US inventor (1791-1872); Ulysses S Grant, US president and general (1822-1885); Erik Thomson, Australian actor (1967-)