Today in history
1429 — Joan of Arc enters Orleans, France, and defeats English.
1628 — Sweden and Denmark sign defence treaty against Duke of Wallenstein, bringing Sweden into the Thirty Years’ War.
1770 — British navigator Captain James Cook, aboard the Endeavour, lands at Botany Bay (originally named Stingray Bay) in Australia.
1913 — Swedish engineer Gideon Sundback patents an improved version of the zipper.
1918 — Germany’s main offensive on the Western Front in World War I ends.
1945 — Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler marries Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker, and designates Admiral Karl Doenitz his successor.
1970 — Queensland students claim a new world car-carrying record when 25 lug a Mini Minor more than 90 metres along Queen street when police ordered it to be removed after it had stalled.
1975 — In the closing hours of the Vietnam War, US task force evacuates foreigners and Vietnamese by helicopter from Saigon.
1980 — British-born film director Sir Alfred Hitchcock dies, aged 80.
1991 — An earthquake in Soviet Georgia kills at least 144 people.
1992 — A jury in Los Angeles acquits policemen charged with beating black man Rodney King, setting off three days of riots that kill 55 people.
1994 — South Africa’s first democratic elections end.
1999 — NATO warplanes accidentally strike a home in Bulgaria during bombing runs over Serbia and Montenegro.
2005 — A UN spokesman reports that UN peacekeepers sexually abused and exploited local women and girls in Liberia.
2011 — Prince William and Kate Middleton marry at London’s Westminster Abbey.
2012 — Federal MP Craig Thomson is suspended from the Labor Party over allegations he misused almost $500,000 in union members’ funds on prostitutes, cash withdrawals and electioneering.
2013 — Syria’s prime minister, Wael Nader al-halqi, narrowly escapes an assassination attempt in Damascus.
2015: Ten years after their arrests in Indonesia for attempting to smuggle heroin from Bali to Australia, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran are executed by firing squad on the prison island of Nusakambangan.
2016 — Syrian airstrikes devastate Aleppo as Assad government says it will enforce a ‘‘regime of calm’’. TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS: John Arbuthnot, English physicistsatirist (1667-1745); Jerry Seinfeld, US comedian (1954-); Michelle Pfeiffer, US actor (1958-); Andre Agassi, US tennis player (1970-); Uma Thurman, US actor (1970-).