ON THIS day

49BC Roman commander Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon river and advances on Rome for a showdown against rival general Gnaeus Pompey.

1799 George Bass and Matthew Flinders return to Sydney on the small sloop Norfolk after circumnavigating Van Diemen’s Land.

1866 Wreck of SS London in Bay of Biscay while steaming from Plymouth bound for Melbourne.

1922 The first injection of insulin is given, to Canadian diabetic boy Leonard Thompson, 14, who goes on to live a normal life. The hormone was isolated by scientists led by Fred Banting and Charles Best.

1928 Thomas Hardy, English writer and author of Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, dies in Dorset at age 87. His ashes are later buried in Westminster Abbey.

1935 Amelia Earhart, one of the world’s most celebrated aviators, makes the first successful solo flight from Hawaii to California, a distance longer than that from the United States to Europe.

1964 US surgeon general Luther L. Terry announces cigarette smoking is linked to lung cancer, in a report calling smoking a health hazard.

1962 More than 600 screaming Twist fans knock over pot plants at Sydney Airport and cause havoc as black US singer Chubby Checker arrives to play the Sydney Stadium.

2004 Iran erupts in protest as hard line clerics on the Guardian Council disqualify hundreds of liberal candidates for the coming parliamentary election.

2008 Edmund Hillary, credited as the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest (above), with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, dies in New Zealand at age 88.

2014 Israeli general and politician Ariel Sharon, who was one of the chief participants in the ArabIsraeli wars and who served as prime minister of Israel (2001– 06), dies at age 85.