Highlights in history on this date:
1431 - After being handed over by the church, who judged her a heretic, Saint Joan of Arc is burned at the stake in Rouen, France, by the English and their French collaborators.
1539 - Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto lands in Florida.
1588 - Spanish Armada under Duke of Medina sails from Lisbon for England.
1593 - Playwright Christopher Marlowe is killed in a lodging house brawl outside London.
1606 - Sikh Guru Arjun is tortured to death in Lahore - now part of Pakistan - on the orders of Mughal Emperor Jahangir, becoming Sikhism's first martyr.
1808 - France's Napoleon Bonaparte annexes Tuscany in Italy.
1814 - First Treaty of Paris is signed between European countries and France, ending Napoleonic wars until the return of Napoleon from exile on Elba.
1904 - Japanese forces occupy Dalmy (Darien) in Russia.
1911 - Ray Harroun wins the first long-distance auto race in Indianapolis.
1913 - Turkey loses almost all of its European holdings to the Balkan states in a treaty signed in London, ending the First Balkan War.
1925 - British police kill 13 demonstrators in Shanghai, provoking months of demonstrations and boycotts against British goods in China. The incident greatly bolsters the tiny Communist party.
1942 - British convoy reaches Murmansk, Soviet Union, despite heavy air attacks in World War II; Britain's Royal Air Force stages massive raid on Cologne, Germany.
1943 - American forces secure the Aleutian island of Attu from the Japanese during World War 2.
1957 - Britain relaxes its restrictions on trade with China.
1958 - Unidentified US soldiers killed in World War 2 and the Korean conflict are buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
1961 - Rafael Trujillo, dictator of Dominican Republic, is assassinated by machine-gun fire while driving.
1963 - Official death toll in windstorm that struck East Pakistan is put at 10 000.
1967 - Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jordan's King Hussein sign a mutual defence treaty, prompting Israel to strike pre-emptively a week later, starting the Six-Day War.
1973 - West Germany and Czechoslovakia agree to establish normal relations after 32 years.
1976 - Pieter Grobbelaar is born in Kimberley, South Africa
1982 - Spain becomes Nato's 16th member, the first country to enter the Western alliance since West Germany in 1955.
1984 - Iraq reports new attacks on naval target near Iran's Kharg Island oil port.
1987 - Mob of militant low-caste villagers massacre at least 42 members of upper-caste landlord families in India's impoverished eastern state of Bihar.
1989 - Student demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in Beijing erect a 10m statue they called the "Goddess of Democracy".
1990 - Israeli soldiers kill four Palestinian guerrillas and capture 12 as they speed toward the coastline, apparently to launch attacks coinciding with Jewish holiday of Shavuot.
1991 - Car bomb explodes near Civil Guard barracks in Vic, Spain, killing at least nine people and injuring 50.
1992 - The UN Security Council imposes trade sanctions on Serbia and Montenegro.
1993 - Heavy machine gun and artillery fire booms in Kabul, Afghanistan, as rival Muslim guerrilla factions shatter a weeklong truce.
1994 - Israel releases hundreds of Palestinian prisoners as part of its autonomy agreement with the PLO.
1995 - Russia formalises a broad relationship with Nato but warns anew that the alliance's plans for an eastward expansion could divide Europe.
1996 - Venezuela's Supreme Court convicts former president Carlos Andres Perez of misusing public funds.
1997 - US Marines evacuate 900 civilians from Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, wracked by looting and violence after a military coup; child molester Jesse K. Timmendequas is convicted and sentenced to death in Trenton, New Jersey, for raping and strangling a 7-year-old neighbour, Megan Kanka. The 1994 murder inspired "Megan's Law," requiring that communities be notified when sex offenders move into the neighbourhood.
1998 - A powerful earthquake rocks northern Afghanistan, burying entire villages and killing thousands of people.
1999 - Fifty-two teen-agers are trampled to death as they try to escape a sudden hailstorm that interrupted an outdoor rock concert in Minsk, Belarus.
2000 - Moving to end Fiji's leadership crisis, the country's army commander imposes martial law and begins to isolate the rebels who have been holding the prime minister and other government officials hostage.
2001 - In one of Germany's last trials surrounding World War 2, a court sentences to life in prison Anton Malloth, an 89-year-old former Nazi SS guard, for beating and kicking a Jewish inmate to death.
2002 - New York City commemorates the completion of a 37-week cleanup effort at the site of the World Trade Centre, destroyed in the terrorist attacks, signalling the beginning of the rebuilding process.
2003 - The UN Security Council votes unanimously to send a peacekeeping force to Congo's northeastern Ituri province. The European Union approves the force to restore order and security in a region plagued by violence among ethnic militias.
2004 - Israel's nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu says in an interview that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 influenced his decision to tell the world about his country's secret nuclear military programme.
Today's Birthdays:
Mikhail Bakunin, Russian anarchist (1814-1876); Howard Hawks, US film director (1896-1977); Hannes Alfven, Swedish astrophysicist/Nobel Prize laureate (1908-1995); Mel Blanc, US entertainer (1908-1989); Benny Goodman, US musician (1909-1986); Clint Walker, actor (1927--); Wynonna, US country singer (1964--), Pieter Grobbelaar (1976-)
Thought For Today:
To write or to speak is almost inevitably to lie a little. It is an attempt to clothe an intangible in a tangible form; to compress an immeasurable into a mold. And in the act of compression, how truth is mangled and torn! - Anne Morrow Lindbergh, American writer.
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