Today in history
1517 — ‘‘Evil May Day’’ riots in London as apprentices attack foreign residents. Sixty rioters are later hanged.
1522 — England declares war on France and Scotland.1648 — Scots begin second Civil War.
1707 — Union between England and Scotland goes into effect under name Great Britain.
1770 — Forby Sutherland is laid to rest at Botany Bay — the first European to be buried in NSW.
1889 — May 1 is chosen by socialist congress meeting in Paris as the date to demonstrate for the eight-hour day.
1937 — Spanish painter Pablo Picasso produces the first sketch of his masterpiece Guernica, five days after the Basque town is bombed by the Germans.
1942 — Japanese forces take Mandalay, Burma, while British retreat along Chindwin Valley to India.
1967 — Elvis Presley marries Priscilla Beaulieu.
1979 — Greenland is granted home rule by Denmark.
1986 — Millions of blacks stay away from jobs and schools in what is described as largest anti-apartheid protest in South Africa’s history.
1989 — Government of Kampuchea changes the country’s name to Cambodia.
1995 — The Croatian Army mounts a full-scale assault on the Serb-held enclave of Slavonia in Croatia, sending thousands of civilians fleeing.
1997 — Britain’s Labour Party, led by Tony Blair, wins a landslide victory in a general election.
1999 — The body of British mountaineer George Mallory is found on Mount Everest, almost 75 years after he disappeared.
2003 — UN international staff return to Baghdad for the first time since the US invasion.
2010 — Pope Benedict XVI cracks down on the scandal-plagued Legionaries of Christ, announcing that a papal envoy would take over and reform the conservative order that has been discredited by revelations that its founder sexually abused seminarians and fathered at least one child.
2015 — The bodies of executed Australian drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran are driven from a Jakarta funeral home to the airport before being flown back to Sydney.
2016 — Kensington Palace releases a series of photos of Princess Charlotte, taken by her mother the Duchess of Cambridge, to mark her first birthday. TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS: Rita Coolidge, US singer (1945-); John Woo, Chinese-born film director (1946-); Joanna Lumley, English actress (1946- ); Wes Anderson, US film director (1969-)