Today in history
1542 – England’s Queen Catherine Howard is executed for treason on the orders of her husband Henry VIII.
1856 – Britain annexes Oudh, increasing Indian hostility to British rule.
1861 – Francis II of Naples surrenders at Gaeta to Giuseppe Garibaldi.
1869 – A small northern Taranaki military settlement, Pukearuhe, is attacked without warning by a Maori war party, with eight European settlers and soldiers killed.
1945 – Allied forces capture Budapest, Hungary, in World War II; US warplanes firebomb Dresden, Germany, wiping out the city and killing more than 35,000 civilians.
1961 – UN Security Council urges use of force to prevent civil war in the Congo.
1968 – Ten thousand US troops are in process of being transported to South Vietnam on speedup basis as fighting increases in that country.
1976 – Nigerian junta leader General Murtala Ramat Muhammed is assassinated in a coup attempt.
1990 – Roaring crowds give Nelson Mandela a hero’s welcome when he returns to the black township of Soweto after being released from prison.
1991 – US planes destroy bunker in Baghdad that allies identified as military site, but apparently contained civilians, with reported death toll ranging from 40 to 500.
1992 – Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat claims tape in which he purportedly made slanderous comments of Jews was doctored.
1993 – Angolan government troops break into UNITA rebel-held highlands in an attempt to open a supply corridor to the embattled city of Huambo.
1997 – Rebels under Laurent Kabila take Zairian town of Faradje while advancing on country’s third largest city, Kisangani.
1998 – Nigerian-led peacekeepers trying to oust Sierra Leone’s military government capture the parliament building in Freetown.
2002 – The Scottish Parliament votes to ban fox hunting, making Scotland the first part of Britain to ban the centuries-old sport.
2007 – British-born author Elizabeth Jolley dies after a long illness, aged 83.
2008 – Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd makes a formal apology to the Aboriginal people and the stolen generation.
2009 – A female suicide bomber targets Shiite pilgrims in Musayyib, killing at least 40.
2012 – Israel blames Iran for bomb attacks on its diplomats’ cars in India and Georgia, heightening concerns that the Jewish state was moving closer to striking its archenemy.
Today’s Birthdays : robbie Williams, British singer (1974-); Mena Suvari, US actress (1979-).