ON THIS DAY
1799 Napoleon Bonaparte, newly returned from his disastrous expedition to Egypt, seizes power in France in the Coup of 18-19 Brumaire, making himself one of three consuls.
1888 Tamworth, NSW, becomes the first town in Australia to have its streets lit by electricity. 1914
The first HMAS Sydney engages the German cruiser Emden off the Cocos Islands, sinking the enemy ship in the first naval action of World War I. Australians celebrate the battle as a successful test of the new Royal Australian Navy.
1918 Kaiser Wilhelm is deposed and flees to The Netherlands.
1923 Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch is routed; 14 Nazis are killed as federal troops break up the march.
1937 Japanese troops take Shanghai after a fierce battle lasting almost three months.
1938 Nazis burn and wreck German Jewish homes, shops and synagogues in what is known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.
1942 US serviceman Edward Joseph Leonski, 24, is hanged at Pentridge for “brownout murders’’ of three Melbourne women. Ivy McLeod, Pauline Thompson and Gladys Hosking had been strangled amid the wartime restrictions on lighting.
1953 Cambodia becomes independent from France.
1953 Poet Dylan Thomas (above) dies at the age of 39 in New York.
1989 Long a symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, erected in 1961 and eventually extending 45km to divide the western and eastern sectors of Berlin, is opened by the East German government.
2008 Bali bombers Amrozi, his brother Ali Ghufron, aka Mukhlas, and Imam Samudra, who murdered 202 people including 88 Australians in 2002, are executed by firing squad.