Today in history

1509 - Pope Julius II excommunicates the Italian state of Venice.

1521 - Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan is killed in the Philippines.

1828 - London Zoo opens in Regents Park.

1910 - Louis Botha and James Hertzog found the South African Party.

1912 - The Liberal Party wins 46 seats and power in Queensland, Australia, under Premier Digby Denham.

1950 - Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies introduces a bill to outlaw the Communist Party.

1969 - Bolivian President Rene Barrientos Ortuno is killed in a helicopter crash.

1972 - US Apollo 16 spacecraft and three astronauts make a safe landing in the Pacific after a journey to the moon.

1976 - First Vietnamese refugee boatpeople arrive in Darwin, Australia.

1993 - Eritreans overwhelmingly choose independence from Ethiopia in a referendum.

1996 - Rwandan soldiers kill 38 people in retaliation for the slaying of one of their own in a northwestern Rwanda village two weeks earlier.

1997 - A Brazilian judge sentences a former police officer convicted of massacring 21 residents of a Rio de Janeiro slum to almost 450 years in prison, saying his actions ‘‘demeaned all values of human existence’’.

2000 - Palaeontologists unveil a two-million-year-old skull of a female Paranthropus robustus, a cousin of early man. The fossil was found in South Africa.

2004 - African National Congress’ Thabo Mbeki is inaugurated for a second term as South Africa’s president 10 years after its first allrace elections and the end of apartheid.

2010 - Ratings agency Standard and Poor’s pushes Greece to the brink of a financial abyss and also downgrades Portugal’s debt, fuelling fears of a continent-wide debt meltdown in Europe.

2014 - Two 20th-century popes who changed the course of the Roman Catholic church become saints as Pope Francis honours John XXIII and John Paul II in a delicate balancing act aimed at bringing together the conservative and progressive wings of the church; Scott Cam, presenter of the Australian Nine Network’s The Block, wins the Gold Logie.

2016 - Seoul says the number of North Korean defectors arriving in South Korea has halved since Kim Jong-un came to power.

Today’s birthdays:

Samuel Morse, US inventor (1791-1872); Ulysses S Grant, US president and general (1822-1885); Erik Thomson, Australian actor (1967-)