Today in history
1517 - Captain Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba, a Spanish explorer, sets sail from Cuba to discover Mexico.
1587 - Mary Queen of Scots is beheaded after being accused of plotting murder of England’s Queen Elizabeth I.
1807 - Indecisive battle at Eylau, Russia, between France and combined Russo-prussian army.
1904 - The Russo-japanese War begins.
1910 - The Boy Scouts of America is incorporated.
1915 - DW Griffith’s silent movie epic about the Civil War, The Birth of a Nation, premieres in Los Angeles; a New Zealand warship is ambushed by Ottoman forces in Turkey, leaving able seaman William Edward Knowles dead. He is the first New Zealander killed by enemy action in WWI.
1920 - Russian Bolsheviks capture Odessa in the Ukraine.
1922 - US President Warren Harding has a radio installed in the White House.
1924 - The first US execution by gas takes place at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City.
1949 - Republic of Ireland declares it is unable to participate in NATO while island remains divided.
1962 - US military council is established in South Vietnam.
1974 - Three US Skylab astronauts return to Earth after setting record of 84 days in orbit.
1975 - Soviet spacemen begin training with Americans for joint Ussoviet Apollo-soyuz flights.
1990 - Punctured oil tanker leaks more than 950,000 liters of oil into Pacific, threatening Southern California beaches.
1992 - Us-european Ulysses space probe passes Jupiter.
1993 - Iranian passenger plane crashes outside Tehran, 132 dead.
1996 - A cargo plane crashes into the market in Kinshasa, Zaire, killing at least 350 people.
1998 - New tremors kill 250 people in an area of Afghanistan hit by a quake that killed 4500 people just days earlier.
2009 - Zurich voters break with long-standing Swiss policy by ending tax breaks for wealthy foreigners like the American singer Tina Turner and the Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg.
2013 - The funeral of an assassinated leftist politician draws thousands of mourners chanting antigovernment slogans to the Tunisian capital, adding to the turmoil as the North African nation tries to transition from dictatorship to democracy.
Today’s Birthdays:
Jules Verne, French author (1828-1905); Jack Lemmon, US actor (1925-2001); James Dean, US actor (1931-1955); Nick Nolte, US actor (1941-); John Grisham, US author (1955-).