Today in history
54 - Roman emperor Claudius I dies, after being poisoned by his wife, Agrippina.
1861 - Kingdom of Italy is divided into prefectures.
1933 - Australia’s first traffic lights installed in Sydney.
1952 - Egypt reaches agreement with Sudan on Nile waters.
1969 - Soviet Union sends third spacecraft into orbit in as many days, putting seven cosmonauts in space.
1985 - Tamil guerrillas attack government troops in two ceasefire violations in Sri Lanka.
1993 - A fanatical fan of tennis player Steffi Graf is convicted of stabbing her arch-rival Monica Seles but receives only a two-year suspended sentence.
1995 - A Dusseldorf court finds four young right-wing extremists guilty of setting a fire to a house in Solingen, killing five Turks in the deadliest attack on foreigners in Germany since the Nazi era.
1998 - A gas explosion sets off a pile of gunpowder used to make illegal fireworks in Tultepec, Mexico, obliterating a two-block area and killing at least 10 people.
2001 - President Hosni Mubarak issues an order that 83 suspected Islamic militants stand trial in Egypt’s state security court.
2003 - Philippines security forces shoot and kill Fathur Rahman alghozi, allegedly a major figure in regional terrorist group Jemaah Islamiah. Al-ghozi escaped from prison in Manila on July.
2005 - Islamic militants launch a major attack on police and government buildings in the provincial capital of Nalchik in Russia’s volatile Caucasus region, turning the city into a war zone. At least 49 people including 25 militants are killed.
2007 - Myanmar’s junta arrests three of the country’s most prominent political activists, believed to be among the last leaders remaining at large from a student group at the forefront of a 1988 democracy uprising and the protests that started in August.
2013 - Bill Shorten wins Australian Labor leadership and Tanya Plibersek becomes deputy leader; Mass evacuations spare India the widespread deaths many had feared from a powerful cyclone that roared ashore as the country sorts through the wreckage of flooded towns, including tens of thousands of destroyed thatch homes.
Today’s Birthdays:
Yves Montand, Italian-born singeractor (1921-1991); Margaret Thatcher, former British prime minister (1925-2013); Lenny Bruce, US comedian (1925-1966); Marie Osmond, US singer (1959-); Kelly Preston, US actress (1962-); Sacha Baron Cohen, British comedian (1971-); Ian Thorpe, Australian swimmer (1982-).