TODAY IN HISTORY
1510 Death of Sandro Botticelli, Italian painter. One of the greatest of the Florentine painters, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera are considered to embody the Renaissance spirit.
1792 Twenty-four New York brokers meet on Wall Street and sign an agreement to fix uniform rates of commission in the sale of stocks and bonds, thus establishing the city’s first stock exchange.
1814 Norway declares its independence from Sweden with the adoption of a new constitution.
1916 Vietnamese patriotic scholar Trần Cao Vân (born 1866) is executed by the French. He was one of the leaders of Việt Nam’s Duy Tân movement during the early days of the French conquest.
1983 Israel and Lebanon reach an agreement on the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon. The pullback started in September.
1988 Fighting rages in Lebanon despite peace efforts by Syria and Iran.
1995 Jacques Chirac becomes France’s president with a promise to rejuvenate a nation scarred by unemployment and inequality.
2001 The United Nations conference on poverty announces the launch of World Trade University a new university to give the world’s poor access to training in international trade and finance. The university global headquaters are located in Chilliwalk, British Columbia, Canada.
2003 Sri Lanka’s heaviest rains in 50 years causes flash flooding that kills an estimated 250 people and washes away whole villages, destroying about 55,000 homes. About 150,000 people are made homeless.
2004 Gay couples begin exchanging marriage vows in Massachusetts, marking the first time a US state has granted gays and lesbians the right to marry.
2006 The UN Security Council adopts a resolution pressing Syria to establish diplomatic relations and set its border with Lebanon as "a significant step" to asserting Beirut’s sovereignty.
2007 Trains from North and South Korea cross the 38th Parallel in a test-run agreed by both governments. This is the first time that trains have crossed the Demilitarized Zone since 1953.
2013 90 people are killed and 200 are injured after a series of bombings across Iraq.
2106 Voters in the American state of Oregon have their mail-in ballots counted for a Democratic Party and Republican Party primary. Donald Trump is the projected winner on the Republican winner while Bernie Sanders is projected to win the Democratic Party race.
2017 Representatives of the European Parliament and European Council sign a document formally granting Ukrainians visa-free travel to the European Union. The visa-free regime is due to enter into force on June 11.
2018 Gina Haspel confirmed as the first female director of the CIA by the US Senate.
2019 Taiwan Island votes to legalise same-sex marriage, the first in Asia.
2021 Long working hours killed 745,000 people a year, in 2016, in the first study of its kind by the World Health Organisation.