Today in history
64 - Great fire of Rome begins.
1536 - The Pope’s authority is declared void in England.
1812 - Britain, by Treaty of Orebro, joins Sweden and Russia against France.
1830 - Uruguayan constitution is sworn in.
1872 - Britain introduces voting by secret ballot.
1912 — Tewfik Pasha becomes Grand Vizier of Persia following the fall of Said Pasha’s ministry.
1923 — The British Matrimonial Causes Act gives women equality in divorce suits.
1966 - South Africa declares it will maintain control of South- West Africa after the World Court dismisses a lawsuit brought by blackruled African states.
1990 - Iraq warns OPEC members it views violations of the group’s production quotas as virtual acts of war, and accuses Kuwait of stealing its oil for the past decade. 1993 Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif resigns and dissolves parliament, leading to general elections.
1994 - Terrorists bomb a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 95.
2004 - An American accused of deserting the US Army and defecting to North Korea is hospitalised immediately after he arrives in Japan, putting himself within the reach of US authorities for the first time in 39 years.
2010 - Pakistan and Afghanistan seal a landmark trade deal as US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pushes the two neighbours to step up civilian co-operation and work together against al-qaeda and the Taliban.
2013 - The government announces that an Australian Special Forces soldier has been wounded in Afghanistan; Alexei Navalny, a charismatic and creative Russian opposition leader who exposed highlevel corruption and mocked the Kremlin, is sentenced to five years in prison on charges of embezzlement.
2014 - World leaders demand that pro-russian rebels give independent investigators unfettered access to the eastern Ukraine crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down with 290 people aboard.
2015 - A US Navy officer becomes the fifth person to die in a mass shooting of US military personnel in Tennessee. Today’s Birthdays: William Makepeace Thackeray, English novelist (1811-1863); Vidkun Quisling, Norwegian politician and Nazi collaborator (1887-1945); Hume Cronyn, Canadian actor (1911-2003); Nelson Mandela, South African president (1918-2013); John Glenn, US astronaut (1921-2016); Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russian poet (1933-2017); Dennis Lillee, Australian cricketer (1949-); Kristen Bell, US actress (1980-).