TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1876: The first successful voice transmission over Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone takes place in Boston as his assistant hears Bell say, “Mr Watson, come here. I want you.”

OTHER EVENTS

1496: Christopher Columbus concludes his second visit to the Western Hemisphere as he leaves Hispaniola for Spain.

1624: England declares war on Spain; Dutch send expedition to Bahia, Brazil.

1629: England’s King Charles I dissolves Parliament and doesn’t call it back for 11 years.

1785: Thomas Jefferson is named US minister to France, succeeding Benjamin Franklin.

1848: US Senate ratifies the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the war with Mexico.

1862: Britain and France recognise independence of Zanzibar; the US Government issues its first paper money.

1880: The Salvation Army arrives in the United States from England.

1893: French colonies of French Guinea and Ivory Coast are formally established.

1900: Britain signs treaty with Uganda to regulate Government with British commissioner as adviser.

1919: Nationalists riot in Cairo following deportation from Egypt of Said Zaghul Pasha.

1922: Strikes break out in Johannesburg, South Africa, and martial law is declared.

1942: Rangoon, Burma — now Yangon, Myanmar, falls to Japanese forces in World War II.

1946: Italian women vote for the first time.

1948: The body of the anti-communist foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, Jan Masaryk, is found in the garden of Czernin Palace in Prague after he ‘mysteriously’ fell from a window, making it easier for the Communist Party to consolidate its control.

1949: Nazi wartime broadcaster Mildred E Gillars, also known as “Axis Sally,” is convicted in Washington, DC, of treason. She served 12 years in prison.

1952: Soviet Union proposes four-power conference on unification and disarmament of Germany.

1959: The Dalai Lama leads a rebellion against Chinese rule. The revolt fails and the Dalai Lama flees to India.

1969: James Earl Ray pleads guilty in Memphis, Tennessee, to the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, but later repudiates his plea.

1972: Cambodia’s Premier Lon Nol takes over complete control of Cambodian Government.

1975: North Vietnamese troops seize most of South Vietnam’s provincial capital of Ban Me Thuot in central highlands.

1985: Konstantin U Chernenko, who was the Soviet Union’s leader for just 13 months, dies at age 73.

1989: About 100,000 workers move into Iraq’s war-battered southern port of Basra to hasten reconstruction of what once was called the “Venice of the East”.

1990: Georgia becomes the fourth Soviet republic to condemn its annexation to the Soviet Union.

1991: A half-million people rally in Moscow in support of Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

1993: Police in Cairo kill at least 20 Muslim extremists in raids, displaying an increasingly hard-line approach against the fundamentalist movement in Egypt.

1997: Despite US reservations, the Vatican establishes diplomatic relations with Libya.

1998: General Augusto Pinochet, the 82-year-old former dictator of Chile, steps down from his position as army commander and is sworn in as senator for life under a provision written into the constitution by his regime.

2002: Candidates allied with independent and far-right Colombian presidential contender, Alvaro Uribe, post gains in congressional elections amid mounting violence between leftist rebel groups and government forces.

2005: After years of denials, Pakistan admits its top nuclear scientist sold centrifuges to Iran, though it sticks by its claim it knew nothing of his activities and insists he will not be turned over to another country for prosecution.

2007: Year-long talks on the future status of Kosovo between Serbia’s Government and the disputed province’s pro-independence ethnic Albanian leadership end in deadlock with Serbia rejecting a UN-mediated proposal.

2013: Hundreds of Christians clash with police across Pakistan, a day after a bomb planted by Muslim extremists burned dozens of homes owned by members of the minority religious group in retaliation for alleged insults against Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

2014: Oscar Pistorius is vividly reminded at his murder trial in South Africa of the gruesome injuries he inflicted on his girlfriend when a pathologist describes how the Olympic athlete fatally shot her multiple times with bullets designed to inflict maximum damage.