Today in history

1792 – Highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier becomes the first person under French law to be executed by guillotine.

1859 – Austria suppresses revolt in Krakow, Poland; Ground is broken for the landmark Suez Canal.

1898 – United States declares war on Spain.

1915 – Allied soldiers invade the Gallipoli Peninsula in an unsuccessful attempt to take the Ottoman Turkish Empire out of Worldwar I.

1916 – Communities across New Zealand gather to mark the first Anzac Day.

1920 – Supreme Allied Command assigns mandates ofmesopotamia and Palestine to Britain, and of Syria and Lebanon to France; Poland launches offensive against Soviets in the Ukraine.

1942 – In the first US counterattack of the war, 16 bombers make a daring daylight raid on Tokyo; A coal mine disaster in Benxi, Japanese-occupied China, kills 1549 workers – the world’s worstmining disaster at the time.

1945 – US and Soviet troops meet at the Elbe River in central Europe, a meeting that dramatises the collapse of Nazi Germany; delegates of 45 nations meet in San Francisco to organise the United Nations.

1963 – A six-strong New Zealand civilian surgical team arrives in Qui Nhon, South Vietnam, as part of the Colombo Plan assistance programme, marking New Zealand’s first involvement in the Vietnamwar.

1991 – Soviet Union’s Communist Party plenum decides to keep Mikhail Gorbachev as leader despite harsh criticism that led him to offer to resign.

1993 – Russian President Boris Yeltsin wins vote of confidence in referendum, but fails to force new parliamentary elections.

1997 – In what is called amonumental defeat for the US tobacco industry, a federal judge rules for the first time that tobacco can be regulated as a drug.

2000 – The United Nations releases a new assessment of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, saying that the worst health consequences for millions of people may be yet to come.

2002 – The US House of Representatives approves a measure to split the Immigration and Naturalisation Service into two separate enforcement and service branches, and making immigration reforma top priority following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Today’s birthdays:

Oliver Cromwell, English statesman (1599-1658); Ella

Fitzgerald, US singer (1918-1996); Al Pacino,

US actor (1940-);

Bjorn Ulvaeus,

Swedish musiciancomposer, ABBA member (1945-); Renee Zellweger, US actress (1969-).