Today in history
1688 — English mariner William Dampier anchors near Cape l’eveque on Western Australia’s northwest coast.
1885 — Dr William Grant of Davenport, Iowa, performs what is believed to be the first appendectomy.
1936 — Billboard magazine in US prints first popular music chart.
1948 — Burma (Myanmar) becomes an independent republic.
1951 — North Korean and Communist Chinese forces take Seoul, Korea.
1964 — Pope Paul VI begins a visit to the Holy Land, which includes the first visit by a pope to Jerusalem.
1982 — Former Australian Liberal prime minister Sir William Mcmahon announces retirement from politics.
1998 — Swedish police arrest 314 after violence erupts at a neo-nazi concert in a suburb of Stockholm.
2002 — The world’s oldest man, 112-year-old Antonio Todde, dies on the Italian island of Sardinia. He claimed the secret of his longevity was a daily glass of red wine.
2004 — Afghans approve a new constitution. The charter creates a presidential system that the country’s Us-backed interim leader Hamid Karzai says is critical to uniting the country.
2009 — A female suicide bomber strikes Shi’ite pilgrims in Baghdad, killing 38 people.
2010 — The world’s tallest building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, officially opens.
2013 — Australia’s southern states swelter through a record-setting heatwave with temperatures above 40C.
2016 — Brisbane 18-year-old Cole Miller dies in hospital, a day after suffering brain injuries in an alleged one-punch attack in Fortitude Valley; Robert Stigwood, Australian-born entertainment impresario who produced the Saturday Night Fever and Grease films and soundtracks, dies aged 81; Queensland’s Director of Public Prosecutions lodges an appeal in the High Court, seeking to appeal the downgrading of Gerard Baden-clay’s conviction from murder to manslaughter over the 2014 death of his wife Allison.
Today’s Birthdays: James Usher, Irish churchman-scholar (1581-1656); Jacob Grimm, German author (1785-1863); Louis Braille, French inventor of reading system for the blind (1809-1852); Sir Isaac Pitman, shorthand inventor (1813-1897); ‘‘General Tom Thumb’’ (Charles Sherwood Stratton), US circus midget (1838-1883); Sir William Deane, former Australian governor-general (1931-); Floyd Patterson, US world boxing champion (1934-2006); Dyan Cannon, US actress (1937-); Doc Neeson, singer-songwriter of Australian band The Angels (1947-2014); Michael Stipe, US rock musician (1960-)