Today in history
1578 — Portugal’s King Sebastian invades Morocco but is killed at Alcazar, together with King Sebastian of Fez and the Moorish pretender.
1621 — French Royalist Army begins Siege of Montauban against Huguenot rebels.
1789 — The French feudal system is abolished.
1870 — The French, led by Marie Macmahon, are defeated at Weissenberg, Germany, by Crown Prince Frederick in Franco-prussian War.
1875 — Death of Hans Christian Andersen, Danish writer of fairy tales.
1907 — French fleet bombards Casablanca following anti-foreign outbreaks.
1914 — Germany invades Belgium and when London’s ultimatum to Berlin to withdraw expires at midnight, Britain declares war on Germany; the United States declares its neutrality.
1916 — Denmark sells Danish Virgin Islands to US for US$25 million.
1944 — Nazi police capture 14-year-old Anne Frank and seven other Jews in hiding places in Amsterdam.
1964 — Bodies of missing civil rights workers Michael H Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James E Chaney are found buried in an earthen dam in Mississippi.
1972 — President Idi Amin declares that Uganda will expel 50,000 Asians with British passports to Britain within three months.
1976 — Eighty-one people are executed in the Sudan on charges they tried to overthrow the government.
1991 — Bus plunges into a ravine killing 80 children and seven adults in Zimbabwe’s worst road accident.
1993 — Japan formally apologises for the first time to women forced to serve its soldiers as sex slaves during World War II.
1995 — Croatia launches a massive attack on breakaway Serbs, bombarding rebel towns and shelling United Nations peacekeepers.
2007 — Nasa launches robotic dirt and ice digger The Phoenix Mars Lander on a nine-month journey to the Arctic Circle to look for traces of life.
2010 — Mud plugs the blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico, ending one of the region’s worst oil spills in US history.
2011 — The drought and famine in Somalia have killed more than 29,000 children under the age of 5, according to US estimates. Today’s Birthdays: Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (1900-2002); Louis Armstrong, US jazz musician (1901-1971); Reg Grundy, Australian game-show pioneer and TV entrepreneur (1923-2016); Billy Bob Thornton, US actor-director (1955-); Barack Obama, American president (1961-).