TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS TUESDAY, JANUARY 9, 2018

Events in history relevant to today:

1431 - Investigations for the trial of Joan of Arc begin in Rouen.

1816 - Explorer James Kelly lands at Port Dalrymple, Tasmania, where he is arrested as a bushranger.

1868 - The last ship to transport convicts to Western Australia docks at Fremantle. 1903 - Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson, son of the poet Alfred Tennyson, becomes the second Governor-General of Australia.

1909 - Ernest Shackleton, leading the Nimrod Expedition to the South Pole, plants the British flag 180km from the South Pole, the closest anyone had reached at that time. 1917 - World War I: The Battle of Rafa is fought near the Egyptian border with Palestine. 1941 - World War II: First flight of the Avro Lancaster bomber. 1969 - The supersonic aeroplane Concorde made its first trial flight, at Bristol, UK. 1972 - Former ocean liner, the Queen Elizabeth, is destroyed by fire in Hong Kong harbour. 1996 - First Chechen War: Chechen separatists launch a raid against the helicopter airfield and later a civilian hospital in the city of Kizlyar in the neighboring Dagestan that turns into a massive hostage crisis involving thousands of civilians.

1997 - Tamil rebels attacked a military base in Sri Lanka. 200 soldiers and 140 rebels were killed.

2004 - An inflatable boat carrying illegal Albanian emigrants stalls near the Karaburun Peninsula en route to Brindisi, Italy; exposure to the elements kills 28. 2007 - Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone at a Macworld keynote in San Francisco.

2011 - Iran Air Flight 277 crashes near Orumiyeh in the northeast of the country, killing 77 people.

2013 - A dust storm off Onslow, Western Australia creates what looks like a huge red ocean wave.

2015 - The perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris two days earlier are both killed after a hostage situation; a second hostage situation related to the Charlie Hebdo shooting occurs at a Jewish market in Vincennes.