Today in history
1521 — Martin Luther is banned by Edict of Worms for his religious beliefs.
1703 — Samuel Pepys, British diarist, dies.
1805 — Emperor Napoleon of France is crowned king of Italy.
1834 — Sikhs capture Peshawar from British in India.
1865 — Surrender of last Confederate (Southern) army at Shreveport, Louisiana, ends United States Civil War.
1868 — US President Andrew Johnson is finally acquitted of charges of ‘‘high crimes and misdemeanours’’.
1923 — The first Le Mans 24-hour motor race is run.
1940 — Evacuation of British troops from France in the face of a German invasion begins at Dunkirk.
1991 — Austrian airliner bound for Vienna explodes and crashes into the jungle in Thailand, killing all 223 people on board.
1994 — Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley marry in the Dominican Republic.
1995 — North Korea acknowledges that it suffers from a grave food shortage, and pleads with Japan for emergency rice aid.
1997 — Australian Prime Minister John Howard makes an unexpected personal apology for the stolen generation of Aboriginal children but backs away from a formal Government apology.
1998 — Japan’s Emperor Akihito expresses sorrow in London for the wartime suffering of British prisoners of war after hundreds of survivors boo and whistle him.
1998 — A doomsday cult member is found guilty of murder in the nerve gas attack that killed 12 people in the Tokyo subway.
2002 — Franco-polish director Roman Polanski wins the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’or (Golden Palm) award for his film The Pianist.
2006 — A Russian regional Supreme Court convicts Nur-pashi Kulayev for 331 deaths in the Beslan school massacre and sentences him to life in prison.
2011 — Ratko Mladic faces charges of genocide in ordering torture, rape and the slaughter of 8000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995.
2015 — Bernie Sanders formally kicks off his Democratic presidential bid with a pitch to liberals to join him in a ‘‘political revolution’’ to transform America’s economy and politics. Today’s Birthdays: Isadora Duncan, US dancer (1877-1927); John Wayne, US actor (1907-1979); Miles Davis, US jazz trumpet player (1926-1991); Stevie Nicks, American singer (1948-); Hank Williams Jr, US country singer (1949-); Lenny Kravitz, US singer (1964-); Helena Bonham Carter, UK actress (1966-); Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark (1968-).