Today in History: Ireland held a referendum to change its Catholic constitution and end a 70-year-old ban on divorce

The following are some of the major events to have occurred on November 24:

1922 – Execution of Erskine Childers in Ireland.

1929 – French statesman Georges Clemenceau died. Known as “the tiger”, he was prime minister of France twice and presided at the post-World War One 1919 peace conference at Versailles.

1944 – The Polish prime minister in exile, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, resigned in protest against lack of support for the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans during World War Two.

1950 - UN troops begin an assault intending to end Korean War by Christmas.

1954 - France sends 20,000 soldiers to Algeria.

1963 – Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of U.S. President John Kennedy, was shot dead by Jack Ruby in the underground garage of the Dallas police headquarters.

1991 – Rock star Freddie Mercury, singer with the band Queen, died of AIDS.

1995 – A referendum was held in Ireland to change its Catholic constitution and end a 70-year-old ban on divorce. The final result was 50.28 percent in favour of legalising divorce and 49.72 percent against.

1998 – Lebanon’s first new president since the end of the 15-year civil war, General Emile Lahoud, was sworn in.

2004 – President Jacques Chirac became the first French head of state to visit Libya since it won independence from Italy in 1951.

2005 – Pat Morita, the Japanese-American actor in the “Karate Kid” movies, died at the age of 73.

2013 – Iran and six world powers reach an agreement to curb Tehran’s nuclear programme in exchange for limited sanctions relief, a first step towards resolving a decade-old standoff.

2016 – Colombia’s government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) sign a revised peace agreement, ending a civil war that lasted more than 50 years.

(Reuters)