Highlights in history on this date:

1500 - France's King Louis XII and Ferdinand of Aragon secretly sign the Treaty of Granada for conquest and partition of Naples.

1528 - Margaret Hunt tells the Bishop of London the secrets of her "sorcery" _ how she combines natural herbs and prayer to heal the sick. She is not prosecuted.

1606 - Peace treaty is signed at Zeitva-Torok between Turks and Austrians.

1620 - Forty-one Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower, anchor in Massachusetts and sign a compact calling for a "body politick."

1673 - Poland's King John Sobieski defeats Turks at Korzim, Poland.

1778 - British forces take St. Lucia, West Indies, from French.

1831 - Former slave Nat Turner, who led a violent insurrection, is executed in Jerusalem, Virginia.

1836 - Chile declares war on Peru-Bolivia Federation.

1895 - British Bechuanaland is annexed to Cape Colony.

1918 - World War I ends with Germany and the Allies signing an armistice in a railroad car at Compiegne, France.

1921 - U.S. President Warren Harding dedicates the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery.

1938 - Kate Smith first sings Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" on U.S. network radio.

1942 - Tearing up the Franco-German armistice which established the occupied zone in 1940, Hitler orders German troops into Unoccupied France on the 25th anniversary of the World War I Armistice.

1951 - Juan Peron is elected for his second of three presidential terms in Argentina.

1964 - Food shortages in India provoke riots.

1965 - Ian Smith declares Rhodesian independence, and Britain says the regime is illegal. The African country is now known as Zimbabwe.

1971 - China's chief delegates to the United Nations arrive in New York City amid tight security arrangements; U.S. Senate ratifies treaty to return island of Okinawa to Japan.

1972 - United States turns over its big base at Long Binh to South Vietnamese, symbolizing end of direct U.S. participation in Vietnam War.

1973 - Egypt and Israel sign cease-fire agreement sponsored by United States and begin discussions to carry out the pact.

1975 - Australian Governor General Sir John Kerr dismisses Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and dissolves Parliament _ the first time in 200 years the British crown exercises its right to remove an elected PM.

1987 - Boris Yeltsin, who criticized what he called the slow pace of Soviet reform, is removed as Moscow Communist Party chief.

1990 - China tells Saddam Hussein it will not veto a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing military action to force Iraq out of Kuwait.

1991 - Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir vows not to give up occupied territories.

1992 - The Church of England votes to ordain women as priests.

1993 - At least 15 people are killed and 47 injured after 52 vehicles including six big-rig trucks are involved in a blazing pileup on a highway in western France.

1994 - A 72-page manuscript of Leonardo da Vinci's scientific diagrams and notes is sold at an auction in New York for a record $30.8 million.

1995 - An avalanche buries a Japanese trekking group in the Mount Everest region in Nepal, killing 26.

1996 - Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu announces a peace agreement with the guerrilla movement, ending 36 years of fighting.

1997 - An 8-year-old boy is killed when Israeli troops fire at Palestinians throwing stones to protest the opening of Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem.

1998 - U.N. personnel leave Baghdad, Iraq, and U.S. President Bill Clinton orders more warplanes and ships to the Persian Gulf after Iraq refuses to allow weapons inspections to continue.

2000 - A cable car being pulled through an Austrian mountainside to a glacier resort catches on fire, killing 155 skiers and snowboarders.

2001 - Thirty-one members of the banned Iran Freedom Movement are tried on charges of plotting to overthrow the government.

2002 - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates pledges $100 million to fight AIDS in India.

2003 - At least six people are killed and 60 injured when police fire rubber bullets at rock-throwing protesters during a general strike that paralyzed the Dominican Republic. The demonstrators were protesting rolling blackouts and the rising costs of gas and food.

2004 - Palestinians at home and abroad weep in an eruption of grief at the death of Yasser Arafat, the man they consider the father of their nation, and quickly elevate his No. 2 in the Palestine Liberation Organization as their top leader.

2005 - Top diplomats from Russia and the United States express hope that a deal could be reached with Iran over the nuclear program that the West fears could help Tehran develop atomic weapons, but the status of a possible compromise remains unclear.

2006 - Unidentified gunmen attack U.N. peacekeepers near a restive slum in Haiti's capital, killing two Jordanian members of the force.

2007 - The largest Protestant paramilitary group in Northern Ireland, the outlawed Ulster Defense Association, renounces violence, officially ending the decades of terror it inflicted on the province's Catholic minority.

2008 - Mohamed Nasheed is sworn in as the Maldives' first democratically elected president.

Today's Birthdays:

Louis Antoine Bougainville, French navigator (1729-1811); Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russian writer (1821-1881); Kurt Vonnegut Jr., U.S. writer (1922-2007); Daniel Ortega, former President of Nicaragua (1945--); Demi Moore, U.S. actress (1962--); Leonardo DiCaprio, U.S. actor (1974--); Calista Flockhart, U.S. actress (1964--).

Thought For Today:

Private opinion creates public opinion. ... That is why private opinion, and private behavior, and private conversation are so terrifyingly important _ Jan Struther (nee Joyce Anstruther), English poet (1901-53).