Today in history
1429 - Henry VI is crowned king of England, seven years after acceding to the throne at the age of 8 months.
1860 - Abraham Lincoln is elected president of the United States.
1893 - Death of Russian composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky.
1913 - Mohandas K Gandhi is arrested while leading a march of Indian miners in South Africa.
1928 - Jacob Schick obtains a patent for his ‘‘shaving implement’’, the first electric razor.
1940 - Franklin Roosevelt is reelected US president.
1971 - World Synod of Catholic Bishops ends stormy meeting at Vatican, deeply divided on question of whether married men may become priests.
1986 - Helicopter ferrying oil workers from offshore rigs crashes in North Sea off Scotland; 45 die.
1968 - Richard Nixon is elected US president, defeating Hubert Humphrey.
1987 - United Nations Secretarygeneral Javier Perez de Cuellar announces significantly broader access by governments and individuals to Nazi war crime archives.
1993 - Evander Holyfield beats Riddock Bowe in heavyweight boxing.
1994 - Rescuers struggle to reach cut-off villages and families trapped under the rubble of collapsed houses amid the devastation caused by heavy flooding across southern Europe.
2000 - Surgeons in London begin to separate conjoined twin girls in a long and complex operation that will kill one baby to give her sister a chance for a long life.
2000 - Hillary Clinton defeats her Republican opponent for a US Senate seat from New York to become the only US first lady ever to win public office.
2002 - The UN children’s agency (Unicef) says one woman dies every 20 minutes in Afghanistan because of complications during pregnancy or childbirth – a maternal mortality rate that ranks among the highest in the world.
2012 - US President Barack Obama wins election to a second term.
2014 - AC/DC fans express dismay that the band will never tour again after drummer Phil Rudd was arrested and charged with attempting to hire a hitman to kill two people.
2016 - Indian government declares levels of air pollution in Delhi an emergency situation, closing schools and construction sites. Today’s Birthdays
Adolphe Sax, Belgian inventor of the saxophone (1814-1894); James A Naismith, Canadian credited with inventing basketball (1861-1939); James Jones, US novelist (1921-1977) Sally Field, US actress (1946-); Emma Stone, US actress (1988-).