TODAY IN HISTORY: Baboon saves British baby

In 1275, King Edward I of England ordered the cessation of the persecution of French Jews.

In 1430, Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians, who sold her to the English.

In 1533, the marriage of England’s King Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon was declared null and void.

In 1541, French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed from St-Malo on his third voyage to Canada.

In 1633, by French government edict, only Roman Catholic settlers were permitted permanent residence within New France, present-day Canada, thus ending 30 years of attempted colonization by Huguenots or Protestants.

In 1633, Samuel de Champlain was appointed governor of New France.

In 1701, Captain William Kidd, a Scottish sailor, was hanged in London after he was convicted of piracy and murder.

In 1785, in a letter to a friend, American inventor-statesman Benjamin Franklin revealed his latest invention – bi-focals.

In 1873, Canada’s North West Mounted Police force was established by an act of

Parliament. The force merged with the Dominion Police in 1920 to form the

Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

In 1887, the first CPR intercontinental passenger train arrived at the new west coast terminal of Vancouver.

In 1915, Germany declared war on Italy during the First World War.

In 1929, the first non-stop Winnipeg-toEdmonton flight was made in six hours and 48 minutes.

In 1934, bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death in a police ambush on a road in Bienville Parish, La.

In 1943, William Aberhart, the inaugural leader of Alberta’s Social Credit party, died in Vancouver. He had led the Socreds to power in 1935. He was born Dec. 30, 1878, on a farm near Kippen in Hibbert Township, Perth County, Ont.

In 1945, Nazi S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler committed suicide at Luneburg, Germany – three days after his capture.

In 1956, the Presbyterian Church in the United States began accepting women ministers.

In 1974, New Brunswick became the first province to draft statutes in both English and French.

In 1975, in what’s believed to have been the first operation of its kind, British doctors kept a critically ill baby alive for 16 hours by linking his heart and kidneys to those of a living baboon.

In 1977, South Moluccan terrorists seized hundreds of hostages in a train and a school in northern Holland. The siege ended nearly three weeks later in a military attack that took the lives of six terrorists and two hostages.

In 1983, Canada’s first heart-lung transplant was performed in London, Ont. John Adams of Thunder Bay, Ont., received a heart and two lungs from an American.

In 1992, the United States and four former Soviet republics agreed in Lisbon to implement the START missile-reduction treaty. The treaty had been reached by the Soviet Union prior to its dissolution.

In 1997, The Anne of Green Gables house – a Victorian farmhouse that inspired the beloved novels of Lucy Maud Montgomery – was damaged by fire.