TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY is Monday, August 26, 2013. On this day:

55 B.C. - Britain was invaded by Roman forces under Julius Caesar.

1498 - Michelangelo was commissioned to make the “Pieta.”

1818 - Explorers John Oxley and George Evans discover the fertile Liverpool Plains in New South Wales.

1835 - Governor Bourke declares John Batman’s treaty with Aborigines, which enabled the founding of Melbourne, to be invalid.

1896 - In the Philippines, an insurrection began against the Spanish government.

1934 - Adolf Hitler demanded that France turn over their Saar region to Germany.

1945 - The Japanese were given surrender instructions on the U.S. battleship Missouri at the end of World War II.

1957 - It was announced that an intercontinental ballistic missile was successfully tested by the Soviet Union.

1978 - Sigmund Jahn blasted off aboard the Russian Soyuz 31 and became the first German in space.

1981 - The U.S. claimed that North Korea fired an antiaircraft missile at a U.S. Surveillance plane while it was over South Korea.

1990 - The 55 Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait left Baghdad by car and headed for the Turkish border.

1991 - Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev promised that national elections would be held.

1992 - A “no-fly zone” was imposed on the southern third of Iraq. The move by the U.S., France and Britain was aimed at protecting Iraqi Shiite Muslims.

2001 - A Norwegian cargo vessel responds to a request for help from Rescue Coordination Centre Australia regarding a boatload of illegal immigrants, sparking the Tampa affair.