Today in history
1522 – Holy Roman Emperor Charles V visits England and signs Treaty of Windsor with King Henry VIII, calling for invasion of France.
1586 – Under threat from Indians, colonists sail from Roanoke Island, North Carolina, ending first settlement by English in America.
1819 – US ship Savannah arrives in Liverpool, England, marking the first Atlantic crossing by a steamship.
1821 – Turkish forces defeat Greek rebels at Dragashan, Turkey.
1862 – US Congress prohibits slavery in US territories.
1885 – Statue of Liberty arrives in New York City from France.
1908 – The ship Kasato Maru arrives in Santos with 168 Japanese families, beginning Japanese immigration to Brazil.
1940 – The trans-pacific liner Niagra is sunk by a German mine off the Northland coast; all 349 on board escape safely.
1944 – US troops take Saipan Island in Pacific from Japanese during World War II.
1953 – Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of nuclear espionage for the Soviet Union, are executed in the United States.
1961 – Kuwait becomes independent of Britain.
1975 – UN Secretary-general Kurt Waldheim opens first major world conference on status of women, in Mexico City.
1984 – Michael Jordan is signed to the Chicago Bulls basketball team, beginning a glittering NBA career.
1987 – Explosion in Barcelona department store garage kills 12 people and injures 31. Basque separatists claim responsibility.
1991 – Hundreds of militant South Korean students clash with riot police on the eve of the second round of that country’s first local elections in 30 years.
2000 – British officials find 58 bodies in a truck container in an English port. Eight men are later convicted in the deaths of the Chinese migrants, who suffocated during the trip from Belgium.
2008 – Serbia’s Supreme Court sentences Radomir Markovic, who was security chief for the late strongman Slobodan Milosevic, to 40 years in prison for organising an attack on a prominent dissident in which four people died.
2012 – The dispute over the Falklands Islands reaches the G-20 summit when the leaders of Britain and Argentina had an uncomfortable exchange on the conference’s sidelines. Today’s Birthdays: Lou Gehrig, US baseball player (1903-1941); Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar opposition leader/nobel peace prise winner (1945– ); Salman Rushdie, Anglo-indian writer (1947– ); Paula Abdul, US singer/dancer (1962– ); Moss Burmester, NZ swimmer (1981-).