Thursday, June 7 1494 - The treaty of Tordesillas was signed, under which Spain and Portugal agreed to divide the New World between themselves.

1523 - Gustavus Vasa was proclaimed King Gustavus I of Sweden after he defeated the Danes.

1840 - Frederick William III of Prussia died and was succeeded by Frederick William IV.

1893 - Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of passive resistance against the occupying British forces in India was born.

1905 - Sweden and Norway agreed to end their union with a treaty of separation, which came into effect the following October.

1917 - In World War I the battle of Messines opened in Flanders with British troops capturing Messines Ridge, a German position overlooking British lines.

1929 - The papal state was revived when the Vatican was established in Rome. It had not existed since 1870.

1942 - The battle of Midway came to an end, inflicting the first major naval defeat of the war on the Japanese in World War II.

1948 - President Edvard Benes of Czechoslovakia resigned, rather than sign a new Constitution which formally made the country a communist state.

1965 - Sony introduced the first ever home video tape recorder in Japan. It could record only in black and white.

1971 - The Soviet spacecraft Soyuz II docked in space with the Salyut Space Station.

1980 - Henry Miller, U.S. author of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, died.

1981 - Israeli planes attacked and destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad, Iraq.

1982 - On the second day of its invasion of Lebanon, Israel mounted major air attacks against Beirut, Tyre and Sidon.

1990 - South African president F.W. de Klerk lifted the four-year-old state of emergency.

1990 - The Warsaw Pact formally abandoned its role as guardian of Kremlin power in Eastern Europe and committed itself to radical democratic change.

1996 - Burma's military rulers passed a stiff new law effectively muzzling Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition party.

2000 - In Sri Lanka a cabinet minister and 22 others were killed in a suicide bomb blast in a southern suburb of Colombo as the country marked its War Heroes Day.