Today’s Highlight

1969: Apollo 11 and its astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins, travel into orbit around the moon.

Other Events

1848: The first women’s rights convention is held in Seneca Falls, New York, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton declares that “Man cannot fulfil his destiny alone.”

1870: France declares war on Prussia, opening Franco-Prussian War.

1907: Emperor of Korea abdicates in favour of his son under Japan’s pressure.

1939: American physician Roy P Scholz of St Louis, Missouri, becomes first surgeon to use fiberglass sutures.

1943: Allied air force stages first raid on Rome in World War II.

1966: Frank Sinatra, 50, marries 20-year-old actess Mia Farrow.

1975: US and Soviet astronauts and cosmonauts end their two-day link-up in space.

1979: Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinistas claim revolutionary victory, two days after President Anastasio Somoza flees the country.

1980: Summer Olympics in Moscow begin, minus dozens of nations boycotting the games because of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.

1984: Geraldine Ferraro becomes first American woman to run for vice- president.

1985: Christa McAuliffe of New Hampshire is chosen to be the first schoolteacher to ride aboard a space shuttle. McAuliffe and six crew members die the following year when the Challenger explodes after lift-off.

1990: Kuwait appeals to Arab neighbours for help against threats from neighbouring Iraq.

1991: Kurds protesting Iraqi rule fight government soldiers in first major clashes since withdrawal of allied forces.

1992: A car bomb kills Paolo Borsellino, Sicily’s top Mafia prosecutor.

1993: Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif resigns and dissolves parliament, under pressure from foes who accuse his government of corruption and electoral fraud.

1994: The US and North Korea reach an interim agreement to ease confrontation over North Korea’s refusal to permit inspection of suspected nuclear sites.

1995: US Congress votes to block billions of dollars in further loans to bail out the ailing Mexican economy, despite the urging of President Bill Clinton.

1999: In southern Mexico, 20 government supporters are sentenced to 35 years each for a massacre of rebel sympathisers; 21 women, 15 children and nine men were gunned down in December 1997, in Acteal, Chiapas.

2000: An international measure is adopted to block rebel groups from trading “conflict diamonds” to fund Africa’s most vicious civil wars.

2002: An inquiry into the murders committed by British doctor Harold Shipman concludes that he killed 215 of his patients, mainly elderly women, between 1975 and 1998. He was convicted in 2000 for murder of 15 of his patients.

2003: An Egyptian appeals court acquits 11 men of debauchery for allegedly engaging in homosexual activity. President Hosni Mubarak ordered a retrial in May 2002, after their initial sentences in November 2001 had sparked international condemnation.

2004: Less than a month after regaining sovereignty from the US occupation authority, Iraq announces the appointment of 43 new ambassadors in its first move to re-engage with the world.

2006: A cruise liner carrying more than 1,000 Americans sails out of Beirut’s port in the first mass US evacuation from Lebanon since Israeli airstrikes started more than a week before.

2008: Pope Benedict XVI apologises for the sexual abuse of children by Australia’s Roman Catholic clergy at a Mass in Sydney.

2009: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, already at the centre of a post-election crisis, comes under criticism from his own hard-line supporters for appointing a first vice-president who once caused an outcry by saying Iranians were friends of Israelis.

Today’s Birthdays

Al-Bukhari, Islamic theologist (1810-1870); Samuel Colt, US inventor (1814-1862); Gottfried Keller, German author (1819-1890); Edgar Degas, French artist (1834-1917); Vladimir Mayakovsky, Russian poet (1893-1930); Brian May, British guitarist w/rock group Queen (1947-); Ilie Nastase, Romanian tennis player (1946-); Anthony Edwards, US actor, (1962-).