Today in history

On July 25, 1593, King Henry IV of France, a Protestant, converted to Roman Catholicism.

In 1917 the Dutch spy known as Mata Hari was sentenced to death by a French court for spying for Germany during World War I.

In 1946 the United States detonated an atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of such a device.

In 1952 Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.

In 1956 the Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish ship Stockholm in heavy fog off the coast of New England, killing 51 people.

In 1963 the United States, Soviet Union and Britain signed a treaty banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, space or underwater.

In 1969 Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of the fatal accident in which campaign aide Mary Jo Kopechne drowned. (Kennedy received a two-month suspended sentence.)

In 1971 Dr. Christiaan Barnard transplanted two lungs and a heart into a man in Cape Town, South Africa.

In 1972 Democratic vice presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton disclosed he had once undergone psychiatric treatment for depression.

In 1974 the Supreme Court raised major hurdles to merging city and suburban schools for racial integration by all but banning the busing of children across school district lines for purposes of desegregation.

In 1978 Louise Joy Brown, the first known “test-tube” baby, was born in Oldham, England. She had been conceived through in-vitro fertilization.

In 1985 a spokeswoman for Rock Hudson confirmed that the actor, who was hospitalized in Paris, had AIDS. (He died Oct. 2 at age 59.)

In 1994 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan’s King Hussein signed a declaration in a White House ceremony ending a 46-year formal state of war.

In 2000 an Air France Concorde supersonic jetliner en route to New York crashed outside Paris shortly after takeoff, killing all 109 people aboard and four people on the ground; it was the first crash of a Concorde.