ON THIS day
871 West Saxons under Ethelred and Alfred the Great defeat Danes at the battle of Ashdown.
1324 Explorer Marco Polo dies, aged 70.
1642 Astronomer Galileo Galilei, 77, dies.
1804 The Sydney Gazette reports the first recorded games of cricket in Australia, by officers of HMS Calcutta.
1889 Louisa Collins is hanged at Darlinghurst Jail for murdering two husbands with arsenic for their life insurance.
1908 Newtown Rugby League Football Club is formed at Newtown Town Hall – Australia’s first league club.
1913 Douglas Mawson’s Swiss expedition companion, Dr Xavier Mertz, dies in Antarctica, poisoned by eating dog liver.
1942 English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who developed a theory of exploding black holes that drew upon both relativity theory and quantum mechanics, is born.
1958 The last three Australian members of the Commonwealth contingent stationed in Korea arrive home in Sydney at the end of the Korean War, marking the official disbanding of the Australian Korea contingent.
1959 Charles de Gaulle is inaugurated as president of France’s Fifth Republic.
1998 Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, convicted of plotting the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, is sentenced to life in prison.
1999 Cricketer Shane Warne tells a Pakistani inquiry he refused an offer of $US200,000 from Saleem Malik for him and Tim May (above, with Warne) to bowl poorly in a match.
2011 US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is shot in the head outside a grocery store in Tucson, Arizona. The gunman kills at least five people including a federal judge.