Today in history
1586 – England’s Queen Elizabeth I confirms death sentence against Mary Queen of Scots.
1619 – The first Thanksgiving celebration takes place in America at the Berkley plantation in Virginia.
1877 – Thomas Edison invents the phonograph in his New Jersey laboratory at Menlo Park.
1893 – British and French reach an agreement on Siam – now Thailand.
1966 – Pirate radio station Radio Hauraki has its first scheduled transmission, from a vessel in the Colville Channel, to circumvent state regulation of New Zealand’s airwaves.
1971 – Indian troops, tanks and planes launch attacks in East Pakistan – now Bangladesh, and hit key airfields in West Pakistan, which is now Pakistan.
1989 – Following his shipboard summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, US President George HW Bush says it is too soon to declare the Cold War over.
1991 – AP Middle East Correspondent Terry Anderson is freed by Shiite Muslim captors in Lebanon after nearly seven years as a hostage.
1992 – US President George HW Bush orders more than 28,000 American troops to lead a mercy mission to Somalia, threatening military action against warlords and gangs who block food for starving millions.
1995 – A Cameroon Airlines jet crashes while trying to land in Yaounde, killing at least 60 people; the first NATO troops land in the Balkans to begin setting up a peace mission.
1996 – NASA launches a spacecraft to Mars carrying the firstever interplanetary rover, a sixwheeled cart that will roam the frigid Martian surface in search of rocks.
2001 – The ex-wife of former South African President FW de Klerk, Marike de Klerk, is found murdered in her home near Cape Town.
2002 – Indonesian police arrest a Muslim cleric, Ali Ghufron, also known as Mukhlas, whom they suspected of masterminding a bombing on the island of Bali that killed nearly 200 people in October.
2006 – Fiji’s military chief, Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama, leads the country’s latest coup, as troops take control away from Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase.
2008 – Zimbabwe declares a national emergency over a cholera epidemic and the collapse of its health care system.
Today’s Birthdays:
Thomas Carlyle, Scottish essayist historian (1795-1881); Samuel Butler, English author (1815-1902); Crazy Horse, Native American Chief (1849-1877); General Francisco Franco, Spanish dictator (1892-1975); Pamela Stephenson, Nz-born actress (1949-); Tyra Banks, US actress/ model/host (1973–).