Today in history
1542 — Pope Paul III establishes the Roman Inquisition to fight Protestantism.
1798 — France’s Napoleon Bonaparte defeats the Egyptians at Battle of the Pyramids and becomes master of Egypt.
1820 — Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted announces his discovery that an electrical current creates a magnetic field.
1861 — The Confederate army defeats Union troops at the Battle of Bull Run in Virginia at the start of the American Civil War.
1873 — Jesse James and his gang pull off the first train robbery in the US, taking US$3000 from the Rock Island Express in Adair, Iowa.
1925 — In Dayton, Tennessee, John T Scopes is convicted of violating state law for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. The conviction is later overturned.
1959 — US District Court judge in New York City rules that DH Lawrence’s famous book Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not pornographic.
1960 — Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon — now Sri Lanka — becomes the world’s first woman prime minister.
1969 — US Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin Jr blast off from the Moon and head back to Earth after man’s first lunar landing.
1973 — France explodes a nuclear device over Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific, despite worldwide protests.
1994 — Former dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn returns to Moscow 20 years after he was expelled.
2000 — Bolivian drug trafficker, Roberto Suarez Gomez, the selfproclaimed ‘‘King of Cocaine’’, dies at age 68. He is believed to be the model for the acclaimed US movie Scarface.
2002 — Worldcom, the secondlargest US telecommunications company, files for the largest US bankruptcy ever, a month after disclosing it had inflated cash flow by US$3.8 billion.
2008 — Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is arrested in a Belgrade suburb by Serbian security forces.
2010 — China’s largest reported oil spill empties beaches along the Yellow Sea as its size doubles, while cleanup efforts include straw mats and frazzled workers with little more than rubber gloves. Today’s Birthdays: Baron Paul Julius von Reuter, German-born news service pioneer (1816-1899); Ernest Hemingway, US author and Nobel laureate (1899-1961); Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens), British pop singer (1948—); Jeff Fatt, musician, purple shirt member of The Wiggles (1953-); Josh Hartnett, US actor (1978-).