Highlights in history on this date:

1059 - Pope Nicholas II issues a decree on the election of popes, declaring that only cardinals will be allowed to elect them.

1528 - Pope Clemente VII establishes commission to determine validity of King Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon in England.

1589 - Britain's Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norris undertake expedition of 150 ships and 18,000 men to Portugal.

1742 - George Frederick Handel conducts first performance of his work Messiah in Dublin.
1848 - Sicily is declared independent of Naples.

1870 - The Metropolitan Museum of Art is founded in New York.

1910 - Australian Labor Party wins federal election and Andrew Fisher becomes prime minister.

1919 - In Amritsar massacre, British troops shoot nearly 380 of Gandhi's followers.

1932 - In Germany, the government bans the Nazi paramilitary groups SS and SA.

1935 - London-to-Australia airline service is introduced by Imperial Airways and Qantas.

1941 - Russia and Japan sign a five-year pact of neutrality in World War II.

1945 - Vienna, the first foreign capital to be occupied by Hitler, is liberated by the Russians under Fedor Tolbukhin; Massive firebombing raids by Allied bombers heavily damage Tokyo.

1961 - United Nations General Assembly condemns South African apartheid.

1964 - Sidney Poitier becomes the first black actor to win an Oscar, taking the best actor award for Lilies of the Field.

1966 - Death of Abdul Salam Arif, president of Iraq, in a helicopter crash.

1969 - Last tram service in Brisbane closes.

1970 - Apollo 13, four-fifths of the way to the moon, is crippled when a tank containing liquid oxygen bursts. The astronauts managed to return safely.

1975 - Christian militiamen in Lebanon kill 22 Palestinians on a bus in a Beirut suburb. This attack is generally accepted as the starting point of the Lebanese Civil War.

1975 - Military coup in Chad overthrows President Ngarta Tombaloaye, who is killed; Felix Malloum takes over at the head of a seven-member junta.

1976 - Munitions plant explosion in Finland leaves 45 dead and seven injured.

1982 - US Secretary of State Alexander Haig returns to Washington after failed attempts in London and Buenos Aires to settle the Falkland Islands dispute.

1985 - The Australian War Memorial changes the title plaques of a bronze statue by Leslie Bowles and a painting by Horace Moore-Jones from `Simpson and his Donkey' to `The Man with the Donkey', in the interests of historical accuracy.

1986 - Stampede by Hindu pilgrims kills at least 46 people and injures 39 others at religious festival along the Ganges River northeast of New Delhi, India.

1986 - Pope John Paul II visits a Rome synagogue in the first recorded papal visit of its kind.

1989 - Solidarity trade union in Poland files for registration after seven-year ban.

1990 - Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev gives Lithuania until April 15 to withdraw its declaration of independence, threatening an economic embargo if it fails to do so.

1990 - Soviet Union admits for the first time its responsibility for the 1940 massacre of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn, Poland.

1992 - The Great Chicago Flood takes place as the city's century-old tunnel system and adjacent basements fill with water from the Chicago River.

1993 - Twelve men accused of plotting the 1991 coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev go on trial for treason.

1995 - Ukraine agrees to close by 2000 the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, the site of an accident in 1986 that resulted in massive radioactive pollution and many deaths.

1996 - Warring factions in Liberia negotiate a ceasefire with help from visiting West African politicians as nearly 1,500 terrified foreigners flee.

1997 - US golfer Tiger Woods becomes the youngest person to win the Masters Tournament and the first player of African-American heritage to claim a major golf title.

1998 - "Marching season" starts on Northern Ireland, but with a historical peace agreement recently reached, Protestant marchers avoid a Catholic neighbourhood rather than provoke a violent standoff.

1999 - A US judge sentences assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian to 10-25 years in prison following his second-degree murder conviction.

2001 - A high-ranking Chechen official in the republic's pro-Russian administration is killed when an explosion rips through a television studio where he was filming a broadcast.

2002 - Former Serbian Interior Minister and accused war criminal Vlajko Stojiljkovic dies two days after he shot himself outside the Yugoslav parliament, hours after it passed a law to send him and other suspects to a UN court.

2005 - Eric Rudolph pleads guilty to carrying out the deadly bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and three other attacks.

2006 - The Scottish-born novelist Muriel Spark, best known for The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, died in Italy aged 88.

2006 - Prime Minister John Howard appears before the Cole inquiry, denying he saw diplomatic cables warning up to six years ago that AWB could be paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's regime.

2007 - Unidentified gunmen kill top Nigerian Muslim hard-liner, Mahmud Adam, as he led morning prayers along with his second-in-command in the northern city of Kano.

2008 - Queensland's governor, Quentin Bryce, is appointed as Australia's first female governor-general.

2009 - In a measured break with half a century of US policy toward communist Cuba, the Obama administration lifts restrictions on Cuban-Americans who want to travel and send money to their island homeland.

2010 - World leaders conclude a 47-nation nuclear security conference, endorsing President Barack Obama's call for securing all of the globe's vulnerable nuclear materials within four years, but offer few specifics for achieving that goal.

2011 - NATO launches new airstrikes on targets held by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi; ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his two sons are detained for investigation of corruption, abuse of power and killing of protesters.

2012 - Bob Brown resigns as Australian Greens leader, after 16 years in parliament, and welcomes being replaced by his long-term deputy, Christine Milne.

2013 - The US and China agree to rid North Korea of nuclear weapons in a test of whether the world powers can shelve years of rivalry and discord and unite in fostering global stability.

2014 - The world's top financial officials say they believe the global economy is strengthening but that growth remains fragile and open to risks of new geopolitical strife, as in Ukraine.