Today in history
1492 — Explorer Christopher Columbus founds a European settlement on the island of Hispaniola.
1799 — George Washington is eulogised by Colonel Henry Lee as ‘‘first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen’’.
1865 — American inventor James H Nason receives patent for the coffee percolator.
1956 — Twenty-one African Americans are arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, for riding in the ‘‘white’’ sections of buses during a mass defiance of laws requiring separation of the races on public transportation.
1962 — Eight East Germans escape to West Berlin by crashing a bus through barriers at border checkpoint.
1971 — Sixteen Vietnam War veterans seize the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour to dramatise their anti-war stand.
1989 — Forces loyal to the Romanian communist government begin surrendering as a videotape aired on television shows the bloody bodies of executed leader Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena.
1997 — French far-right politician Jean-marie Le Pen is convicted of denying Nazi crimes after he said the gas chambers were a ‘‘historic detail’’ at a Munich news conference.
1998 — Khmer Rouge leaders Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, considered to be among the architects of the group’s genocidal reign in the 1970s, surrender to the government.
2002 — The United State State Department verifies reports that the Burma military had carried out mass rapes as part of a campaign from 1996 to 2001 to suppress an ethnic insurgency in Shan state.
2003 — An earthquake rocks the Iranian city of Bam, 980 kilometres southeast of the capital Tehran, killing 50,000 people and destroying 90 per cent of the city’s residential area.
2004 — Massive tsunami triggered by earthquakes tears across the Indian Ocean, devastating coastal communities in 12 countries, killing at least 216,000 people, and leaving more than a million people homeless.
2007 — A ruptured gasoline pipeline explodes in flames, killing at least 34 people near Nigeria’s main city of Lagos.
2012 — Russia moves toward finalising a ban on Americans adopting Russian children. Today’s Birthdays: Charles Babbage, English mathematician and inventor of first computer (1791-1871); Mao Zedong, Chinese leader (1893-1976); Phil Spector, US music producer (1939-); Lars Ulrich, US drummer with Metallica (1963-); Jared Leto, US actor and musician (1971-) Yohan Blake, Jamaican sprinter (1989-).