Today in history, November 5: France and Britain declare war on Turkey. Britain annexes Cyprus.

On this day in 1914, France and Britain declare war on Turkey. Britain annexes Cyprus.

Highlights in history on this date:

1605: Gunpowder Plot by Guy Fawkes to blow up British houses of Parliament is uncovered.
1799: Governor of NSW John Hunter is recalled and Philip Gidley King is named his successor.
1803: First birth in Victoria officially recorded.
1914: France and Britain declare war on Turkey. Britain annexes Cyprus.
1916: Central Powers proclaim Kingdom of Poland.
1928: Mount Etna in Sicily erupts, destroying a large area. Village of Mascali is completely buried.
1938: Thomas Playford Junior becomes premier of South Australia after resignation of Richard Butler.
1946: John F. Kennedy is first elected to the US House of Representatives.
1956: Soviet Union threatens use of rockets unless Britain and France accept ceasefire.
1962: UN General Assembly demands all nuclear tests cease by January 1, 1963.
1965: Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith declares a state of emergency in preparation for his unilateral declaration of independence from Britain.
1968: Richard Nixon wins the US presidency.
1985: UN General Assembly approves resolution calling on Vietnam to withdraw its forces from Cambodia.
1990: Rabbi Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn-born Israeli extremist, is shot dead after a speech at a New York hotel.
1993: Talks on restoring ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power collapse in Haiti when military representatives fail to attend.
1994: Former US President Ronald Reagan discloses he has Alzheimer’s disease.
1996: US President Bill Clinton wins re-election by a landslide over Republican challenger Bob Dole.
1997: A German state court rejects claims of reparation by elderly Jewish women for their slave labour in Auschwitz during WWII.
1998: The high court in Freetown sentences Sierra Leone’s former President Joseph Momoh to 10 years in prison on charges of conspiracy, while 14 other people are sentenced to death.
1999: China announces the first criminal charges against the leaders of the Falun Gong spiritual sect.
2000: Two thousand police officers struggle to control 1200 neo-Nazi marchers and left-wing counter-protesters in Berlin. Some officers are hurt in scuffles.
2003: Gary Leon Ridgway pleads guilty to 48 murders in the US known collectively as the Green River killings after the Seattle-area waterway in which the first of the victims was discovered in 1982.
2006: Saddam Hussein is sentenced to death by an Iraqi court for crimes against humanity, closing a quarter-century-old chapter of violent suppression by the former dictator.
2008: Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon announces she will not renew her contract when it expires at the end of March 2009.
2009: Saudi Arabia sends fighter jets and artillery rounds across the border into northern Yemen in a military incursion apparently aimed at helping its troubled southern neighbour control an escalating Shiite rebellion.
2010: About 122 people are killed when a surge of searing gas races down the sides of Mount Merapi, also smothering cattle and houses in the Indonesian volcano’s path.
2011: Tens of thousands of opposition activists demonstrate in central Rome for the ouster of Premier Silvio Berlusconi.
2012: Palestinian supporters join Syrian rebels as fighting intensifies against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the country’s capital Damascus.
2013: Horse trainer Gai Waterhouse wins her first Melbourne Cup with Fiorante.
2015: The body of 12-year-old Tiahleigh Palmer is found on the banks of the Pimpama River on the Gold Coast.
2017: A 27-year-old woman and an eight-year-old boy she was caring for are killed after being hit by a truck on the Pacific Motorway near Newcastle; Gunman shoots 26 dead and injures 20 at a church in Sunderland Springs, Texas.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
“The most exhausting thing in life … is being insincere” — Anne Morrow Lindbergh, American writer (1906-2001).