Today in history
1536 – Anne Boleyn, wife of King Henry VIII, and her brother, Lord Rochford, are tried and found guilty in England of adultery and incest.
1602 – Bartholomew Gosnold, English navigator, discovers Cape Cod, on the US coast of what is now Massachusetts.
1916 – Sykes-picot agreement between Britain and France carves up Arab regions of former Ottoman empire.
1918 – The first experimental airmail route in the US starts between Washington, Philadelphia and New York.
1920 – Charles Mackay’s 11 years as mayor of Whanganui ends in disgrace when he shoots a man in his office, following a homosexual advance.
1930 – Ellen Church, the first airline stewardess, goes on duty aboard a United Airlines flight between San Francisco and Cheyenne, Wyoming.
1940 – The Netherlands surrenders to Germany in World War II; nylon stockings go on general sale for the first time in the US.
1955 – Austrian state treaty is signed, ending 10 years of Allied occupation.
1957 – Britain explodes its first thermonuclear bomb in central Pacific.
1970 – Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, two black students at Jackson State University in Mississippi, are killed when police open fire during student protests.
1989 – Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Beijing declares an end to Sino-soviet split.
1993 – An overwhelming majority of Bosnian Serbs vote against a peace accord which would have forced them to surrender some of the 70 per cent of Bosnia they control.
1994 – Aid officials report that the death toll may have reached 200,000 in Rwanda, where Hutus are on a campaign of genocide against minority Tutsis since April 6.
1998 – To international condemnation, India declares itself a nuclear nation after five bomb tests the same week.
2008 – Myanmar government says military-backed constitution has been overwhelmingly approved by voters – a claim that has come under fire for being held while the country responds to a massive cyclone that has killed tens of thousands of people.
2012 – Socialist Francois Hollande assumes France’s presidency, inheriting a country fearful for its financial future and jetting off immediately to Berlin to tackle his most pressing problem: Europe’s debt crisis. Today’s Birthdays: William Lamb, British statesman (1779-1852); Pierre Curie, French scientist (1859-1906); Mike Oldfield, British composer (1953– ).