Today in history
1694 – Queen Mary II of England dies after five years of joint rule with her husband, King William III.
1832 – John Calhoun becomes the first US vice president to resign, stepping down over differences with President Andrew Jackson.
1836 – Spain recognises independence of Mexico.
1869 – William Semple of Ohio patents chewing gum.
1929 – New Zealand military police open fire on a demonstration in Apia, Samoa, killing 11 people taking part in a protest against New Zealand’s governance of the South Pacific territory.
1942 – Japanese planes bomb Calcutta, India, in World War II.
1948 – Premier Nokrashy Pasha of Egypt is assassinated.
1950 – Chinese forces cross the 38th parallel in Korea.
1966 – China detonates its fifth atomic bomb.
1981 – Elizabeth Jordan Carr, the first American test-tube baby, is born in Norfolk, Virginia.
1984 – Cambodian guerrillas counterattack for the fourth straight day despite withering artillery fire from a Vietnamese-occupying refugee camp along the Thaicambodian border.
1998 – Three yachtsmen are reported dead, five are missing and dozens injured in the most disastrous Sydney to Hobart yacht race in its 54-year history.
2005 – A Russian parliamentary commission investigating the deadly school siege in Beslan criticises officials for not following orders and for trying to disguise the seriousness of the terrorist attack that left more than 330 people dead.
2006 – Ten people show signs of low-level exposure to polonium-210, the rare radioactive element that killed one-time Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko. Seven were staff from London’s Millennium Hotel Pine Bar, which Litvinenko visited the day he became ill.
2007 – Hundreds of thousands of mourners gather in front of the mausoleum where Benazir Bhutto is to be interred in southern Pakistan the same day the government says al-qaida and the Taliban were responsible for her death.
2011 – North Korea’s next leader escorts his father’s hearse in an elaborate state funeral on a bitter, snowy day, bowing and saluting in front of tens of thousands of citizens who wailed and stamped their feet in grief for Kim Jong Il.
2014 — US, NATO hold quiet ceremony to mark end of 13-year Afghanistan war, but insurgency rages on Today’s birthdays: Woodrow Wilson, US president (1856-1924); King Birenda of Nepal (1945-2001); Maggie Smith, British actress (1934—);Denzel Washington, US actor (1954—); John Legend, US singer (1978—).