Saturday, May 12 1870 - Canada bought Manitoba from the Hudson's Bay Company and made it a province.

1884 - Czech composer Bedrich Smetana, composer of operas including "The Bartered Bride", died.

1926 - Norwegian Roald Amundsen, Italian Umberto Nobile and American Lincoln Ellsworth crossed the North Pole in an airship.

1926 - Jozef Pilsudski led a successful military coup in Poland.

1943 - The German commander in North Africa, General Von Arnim, surrendered in World War II. He had led many successful military operations against Allied forces there.

1949 - The Russian blockade of Berlin officially ended after 11 months.

1957 - Erich von Stroheim, one of the silent screen's greatest directors, died. His films include ***Greed*** and ****The Merry Widow****.

1975 - U.S. president Gerald Ford ordered the aircraft carrier Coral Sea into the Gulf of Thailand after the Cambodian Navy seized the American merchant ship Mayaguez.

1991 - The moderate Nepali Congress won Nepal's first multi-party elections in 32 years.

1997 - India and Pakistan agreed to release each other's imprisoned nationals and to set up a telephone hot line to ease tensions.

1997 - Russian president Boris Yeltsin and Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov signed a peace accord promising to end 400 years of intermittent conflict.

1999 - Russian president Boris Yeltsin sacked prime minister Yevgeny Primakov and named first deputy prime minister Sergei Stepashin as acting premier.

2000 - Pakistan's Supreme Court upheld as legal the October 12 Army coup that ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif but gave the military three years to carry out its reform plans.

2000 - South Africa's highest court upheld the conviction of anti-apartheid cleric Allan Boesak for theft and fraud and sentenced him to three years in jail.