Today in history
323 BC - Death of Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia, of malaria aged 33.
1381 - The Peasants’ Revolt, a popular uprising led by Wat Tyler and sparked by the implementation of a poll tax, begins in Britain.
1665 - Dutch fleet is defeated by English off Lowestoft, England.
1886 - Mysterious death by drowning of Bavaria’s ‘‘Mad’’ King Ludwig.
1893 - First women’s golf tournament is played at Royal Lytham, England.
1917 - Fourteen German Gotha bombers carry out the first largescale bombing raid by planes on London, killing 162.
1927 - United States aviator Charles Lindbergh is honoured with a ticker-tape parade in New York City after his pioneering transatlantic flight.
1956 - Last British troops leave Suez Canal base, turning the waterway over to Egypt after 74 years of operation.
1964 - South African antiapartheid activist Nelson Mandela arrives on Robben Island to begin his life sentence, imposed the previous day.
1969 - Withdrawal of US combat troops from South Vietnam begins with pullout of unit fighting in Mekong Delta.
1983 - US spacecraft Pioneer 10 crosses the orbit of Neptune and becomes the first man-made object to leave the solar system.
1990 - East Germany begins final demolition of the Berlin Wall, knocking out concrete slabs all over the city to reopen streets sealed since the Cold War barrier was built in 1961.
1995 - France announces it will abandon its 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing and conduct eight more tests in the South Pacific between September and May.
1997 - Timothy Mcveigh, a 29-year-old army veteran, is sentenced to death for bombing a government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.
2005 - US pop star Michael Jackson is cleared of all charges in a sex abuse trial that threatened to destroy his career.
2013 - A proposal to build a massive rival to the Panama Canal across the middle of Nicaragua is overwhelmingly backed by politicians. Today’s Birthdays: William Butler Yeats, Irish poet (1865-1939); Slim Dusty, Australian country singer (1927-2003); Malcolm Mcdowell, British actor (1943-); Ban Ki-moon, the current UN Secretary General (1944-); Richard Thomas, US actor (1951-); Tim Allen, US actorcomedian (1953-); Ashley and Marykate Olsen, US actresses (1986-).