Today in history
1590 - Giovanni Battista signs treaty with French Huguenots to bring army of 156,000 German and Swiss mercenaries into France.
1776 - British forces occupy New York City during the American Revolution. 1810 - Mexico rejects Spanish rule. 1916 - Tanks are used for the first time in war, in a British attack on German lines near the Somme in France.
1935 - The Nuremberg laws are passed, making discrimination against Jews part of Germany’s national policy and making the swastika the official symbol of Nazi Germany.
1938 - British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain visits Germany’s Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden, where Hitler states his determination to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.
1942 - German armies attack Russian city of Stalingrad in World War II.
1976 - The Lyttelton-wellington ferry service ends, leaving only a Picton-wellington inter-island service.
1995 - Tanks, howitzers and other heavy weaponry roll away from Sarajevo as Bosnian Serbs begin complying with a Us-brokered agreement to ease the shattered city’s siege.
1999 - Countries from France to New Zealand promise to send soldiers to rescue starving refugees from slaughter in East Timor, as the UN Security Council authorises an international peacekeeping force for the beleaguered province, under Indonesian rule since 1975.
2000 - Mexicans are free to publicly toast their independence from Spain for the first time in 70 years. The sale of alcoholic beverages during patriotic Mexican events had been banned since President Pascual Ortiz Rubio was wounded in an assassination attempt in 1930.
2004 - New Zealand prepares to pull its military engineering contingent out of Basra in Iraq as security in the country worsens.
2007 - The leader of al-qaida in Iraq offers money for the murder of Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks and his editor who recently produced images deemed insulting to Islam.
2008 - Zimbabwe’s opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai signs a power-sharing agreement with his nemesis President Robert Mugabe.
2010 - ACT MP David Garrett admits he has a historic conviction for using a dead baby’s identity to apply for a false passport.
2013 - David Cunliffe wins the NZ Labour Party leadership in a threeway tussle to replace David Shearer. Today’s Birthdays: Agatha Christie, British writer (1890-1976); Jean Batten, NZ air pioneer (1909-1982); Oliver Stone, US film director (1946-); Britain’s Prince Harry (1984-).