Today in history
1767 - The boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania, the Mason-dixon line, which divides America’s south from the north, is agreed upon.
1867 - The United States takes formal possession of Alaska from Russia.
1892 - The first long-distance telephone line is opened between Chicago and New York.
1924 - An Otago sheep farmer and amateur radio enthusiast sends the first trans-global radio transmission, a morse code message received in London.
1944 - Soviet troops invade Czechoslovakia during World War II.
1968 - The US Olympic Committee suspends two black athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, for giving a black-power salute as a protest at a victory ceremony in Mexico City.
1995 - The US announces it will grant Fidel Castro a visa, permitting the Cuban president to address the United Nations.
1999 - Former South African President Nelson Mandela begins his first visit to Israel, a gesture of final reconciliation with a nation that had backed South Africa’s apartheid regime.
2001 - Four Osama bin Laden disciples convicted in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa are sentenced in New York City to life without parole.
2002 - The Vatican rejects parts of a plan adopted in June by the US Council of Catholic Bishops to deal with the sexual abuse of minors by Roman Catholic clergy in the US.
2004 - India’s most wanted bandit, Koose Muniswamy Veerappan, 60, a brutal smuggler who eluded police for three decades in dense jungles, is killed in a shootout with security forces.
2007 - Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto returns to Karachi after eight years of exile. A suspected suicide bomber strikes near the truck carrying her, killing 108 people, but Bhutto escapes unhurt. She would be killed just months later.
2010 - The latest Facebook privacy fiasco shows that the world’s largest online social hub is having a hard time putting this thorny issue behind it even as it continues to attract users and become indispensable to many of them.
2011 - Looking thin, weary and dazed, Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit emerges from more than five years in captivity, surrounded by Hamas militants with black face masks who hand him over to Egyptian mediators in an exchange for 1000 Palestinian prisoners.
Today’s Birthdays
Lee Harvey Oswald, accused killer of US President John F Kennedy (1939-1963); Chuck Berry, US singer (1926- ); Martina Navratilova, Czech tennis player (1956- ), US actor Zac Effron (1987- ).