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1586 – England’s Queen Elizabeth I confirms death sentence against Mary Queen of Scots.

1619 – The first Thanksgiving celebration takes place in America at the Berkley plantation in Virginia.

1877 – Thomas Edison invents the phonograph in his New Jersey laboratory at Menlo Park.

1893 – British and French reach an agreement on Siam – now Thailand.

1966 – Pirate radio station Radio Hauraki has its first scheduled transmission, from a vessel in the Colville Channel, to circumvent state regulation of New Zealand’s airwaves.

1971 – Indian troops, tanks and planes launch attacks in East Pakistan – now Bangladesh, and hit key airfields in West Pakistan, which is now Pakistan.

1989 – Following his shipboard summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, US President George HW Bush says it is too soon to declare the ColdWar over.

1991 – APMiddle East Correspondent Terry Anderson is freed by Shiite Muslim captors in Lebanon after nearly seven years as a hostage.

1992 – US President George HW Bush orders more than 28,000 American troops to lead amercy mission to Somalia, threatening military action against warlords and gangs who block food for starving millions.

1995 – A Cameroon Airlines jet crashes while trying to land in Yaounde, killing at least 60 people; the first NATO troops land in the Balkans to begin setting up a peace mission.

1996 – NASA launches a spacecraft to Mars carrying the firstever interplanetary rover, a sixwheeled cart that will roam the frigid Martian surface in search of rocks.

2001 – The ex-wife of former South African President FWde Klerk, Marike de Klerk, is found murdered in her home near Cape Town.

2002 – Indonesian police arrest a Muslim cleric, Ali Ghufron, also known as Mukhlas, whom they suspected of masterminding a bombing on the island of Bali that killed nearly 200 people in October.

2006 – Fiji’s military chief, Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama, leads the country’s latest coup, as troops take control away from Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase.

2008 – Zimbabwe declares a national emergency over a cholera epidemic and the collapse of its health care system.

Today’s Birthdays:

Thomas Carlyle, Scottish essayisthistorian (1795-1881); Samuel Butler, English author (1815-1902); Crazy Horse, Native American Chief (1849-1877); General Francisco Franco, Spanish dictator (1892-1975); Pamela Stephenson, NZ-born actress (1949-)