May 28th

Today's Highlight in History:
On May 28th, 1863, the first black regiment from the North left Boston to fight in the Civil War.

On this date:
In 1533, England's Archbishop declared the marriage of King Henry the Eighth to Anne Boleyn valid.

In 1892, the Sierra Club was organized in San Francisco.

In 1934, the Dionne quintuplets -- Annette, Cecile, Emilie, Marie and Yvonne -- were born to Elzire Dionne at the family farm in Ontario, Canada.

In 1937, Neville Chamberlain became prime minister of Britain.

In 1940, during World War Two, the Belgian army surrendered to invading German forces.

In 1972, the Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated the English throne to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson, died in Paris at age 77.

In 1977, 165 people were killed when fire raced through the Beverly Hills Supper Club in Southgate, Kentucky.

In 1984, President Reagan led a state funeral at Arlington National Cemetery for an unidentified American soldier killed in the Vietnam War. (However, the remains were later exhumed and identified as those of Air Force First Lieutenant Michael J. Blassie, and were sent to St. Louis for hometown burial.)

In 1985, David Jacobsen, director of the American University Hospital in Beirut, Lebanon, was abducted by pro-Iranian kidnappers (he was freed 17 months later).

In 1987, Mathias Rust, a 19-year-old West German pilot, landed a private plane in Moscow's Red Square after evading Soviet air defenses.

Ten years ago: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein opened a two-day Arab League summit in Baghdad with a keynote address in which he said if Israel were to deploy nuclear or chemical weapons against Arabs, Iraq would respond with "weapons of mass destruction."

Five years ago: An earthquake with a magnitude of seven-point-five devastated the Russian town of Neftegorsk, killing at least two-thousand people. Bosnia's foreign minister and three colleagues were killed when rebel Serbs shot down their helicopter.

One year ago: Russia's Balkan envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin, met face-to-face with Slobodan Milosevic for nine hours, declaring the Yugoslav president key to a Kosovo peace plan despite complications caused by his indictment for war crimes.

"Like other spurious things, fastidiousness is often inconsistent with itself, the coarsest things are done, and the cruelest things said by the most fastidious people."

-- Caroline Matilda Stansbury Kirkland, American author (1801-1864).