Today in history

1527 - Florence becomes a republic

1532 - Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro lands with a small band of soldiers on the northern coast of Peru; Sir Thomas More resigns as Lord Chancellor of England.

1547 - Protestant German monarch surrenders to Karel in Wittenberg.

1568 - Mary Queen of Scotland flees to England.

1596 - Spanish stronghold of La Fere, in what is now northern France, capitulates to French.

1763 - Samuel Johnson meets future biographer James Boswell.

1920 - Joan of Arc is canonised in Rome.

1929 - The first Academy Awards are presented during a banquet at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

1962 - US Marines begin arriving in Thailand to help counter communist threat from neighbouring Laos.

1975 - Japanese climber Junko Tabei becomes the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

1989 - Hundreds of thousands arrive in Beijing to support college students fasting for freedom in Tiananmen Square.

1995 - Japanese police arrest doomsday cult leader Shoko Asahara in connection with the nerve-gas attack that killed 12 on Tokyo’s subways two months earlier.

2000 - Cuba frees Marta Beatriz, a well-known dissident there, following a United Nations censure for human rights abuses.

2003 - Twenty-nine people are killed and about 100 others injured in five nearly simultaneous suicide bombing attacks in Casablanca, Morocco’s largest city and commercial centre.

2010 - Iraq’s electoral commission affirms the narrow victory of a Sunnibacked bloc in the March vote after a partial recount undercut the Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-maliki’s claims of fraud in the tally.

2012 - Russian police arrest about 20 protesters at a central Moscow square where demonstrators had moved after police uprooted them from a camp, the latest move in a broadening crackdown on the forces opposing President Vladimir Putin.

2013 - The first exiles from an Iranian opposition group have moved to Albania from a camp near Baghdad as part of a relocation process, the UN says, a step toward defusing an explosive dispute left over from the Iran-iraq war of the 1980s and the Us-led ousting of President Saddam Hussein. Today’s Birthdays: Maria Agnesi, Italian, first woman to become a known mathematician (1718-1799); Henry Fonda, US actor (1905-1982); HE Bates, English author (1905-1974); Woody Herman, US jazz musician (1913-1987) Janet Jackson, US pop singer (1966-), Pierce Brosnan, actor (1953-).