Today in history
1527 – Florence becomes a republic.
1532 – Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro lands with a small band of soldiers on the northern coast of Peru; Sir Thomas More resigns as Lord Chancellor of England.
1547 – Protestant German monarch surrenders to Karel inwittenberg.
1568 – Mary, Queen of Scots, flees to England.
1596 – Spanish stronghold of La Fere, in what is now northern France, capitulates to the French.
1763 – Samuel Johnson meets future biographer James Boswell.
1920 – Joan of Arc is canonised in Rome.
1929 – The first Academy Awards are presented during a banquet at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.
1962 – US Marines begin arriving in Thailand to counter the communist threat from neighbouring Laos.
1975 – Japanese climber Junko Tabei becomes the first woman to reach the summit of Mt Everest.
1989 – Hundreds of thousands of people arrive in Beijing to support college students fasting for freedom in Tiananmen Square.
1995 – Japanese police arrest doomsday cult leader Shoko Asahara in connection with the nerve-gas attack that killed 12 on Tokyo’s subways twomonths earlier.
2000 – Cuba freesmarta Beatriz, a well-known dissident there, following a United Nations censure for human rights abuses.
2003 – Twenty-nine people are killed and about 100 others injured in five nearly simultaneous suicide bombing attacks in Casablanca, Morocco’s largest city and commercial centre.
2010 – Iraq’s electoral commission affirms the narrow victory of a Sunnibacked bloc in the March vote after a partial recount undercut the Shi’ite Prime Minister Nouri al-maliki’s claims of fraud in the tally.
2012 – Russian police arrest about 20 protesters at a central Moscow square where demonstrators had moved after police uprooted them from a camp, the latest move in a broadening crackdown on the forces opposing President Vladimir Putin.
2013 – The first exiles from an Iranian opposition group moved to Albania from a camp near Baghdad as part of a relocation process, the UN says, a step toward defusing an explosive dispute left over from the Iran-iraq war of the 1980s and the Us-led ousting of President Saddam Hussein.
Today’s birthdays:
Maria Agnesi, Italian, first woman to become a known mathematician (1718-1799); Henry
Fonda, US actor (1905-1982);
HE Bates, English author (1905-1974);
Woody Herman,
US jazz musician (1913-1987); Janet Jackson, US pop singer (1966-), Pierce Brosnan, actor (1953-).