Bornholm market towns and 15 parishes. In addition to supervising parish municipalities, which was the responsibility of the counties in "all" of Denmark, the market town municipalities of Bornholm were supervised by Bornholm County as well and not by the Interior Ministry as was the case in the rest of Denmark. The seat of the municipal council is the island's main town, Rønne. The voters decided to merge the county with the municipalities in a referendum May 29, 2001, effective from January 1, 2003. The question on the ballot was, "Do you want the six municipal entities of Bornholm to be
History of the Pacific Islands the overwhelming majority today, was visited by Polynesian and Melanesian invaders before the first European sailors "discovered" the islands in the 16th century. For much of the subsequent period, the main island chain, the Gilbert Islands, was ruled as part of the British Empire. The country gained its independence in 1979 and has since been known as Kiribati. History of Malaysia is the written past of a country in South East Asia whose strategic sea-lane position brought trade and foreign influences that fundamentally influenced its history. Hindu India, the Islamic Middle East and Christian Europe to its west, and China