Today in history
1515 — Death of Aldus Manutius, Italian editor and printer who produced the first paperbacks and invented italics.
1643 — Dutch mariner Abel Tasman discovers the Fiji Islands.
1804 — Joseph Priestley, English cleric and chemist, one of the discoverers of oxygen, dies.
1819 — East India Company, represented by Stamford Raffles, establishes settlement at Singapore.
1840 — Treaty of Waitangi is signed in New Zealand.
1906 — Bondi Surf Bathers Life Saving Club, believed to be the world’s first life-saving club, is founded in Sydney.
1918 — Women over 30 and men over 21 win the right to vote in Britain as the Representation of the People Act receives royal assent.
1943 — Los Angeles jury acquits Australian actor Errol Flynn of three counts of statutory rape.
1952 — Death of England’s King George VI, who is succeeded by Elizabeth II.
1959 — The United States successfully test-fires for the first time a Titan intercontinental ballistic missile from Cape Canaveral.
1976 — The US Lockheed Aircraft Corporation admits it bribed officials in the Netherlands, Japan, Sweden and Italy.
1989 — Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Barbara W Tuchman dies, aged 77.
1998 — US President Bill Clinton tells journalists he will never resign over the Monica Lewinsky scandal; Carl Wilson, co-founder of the Beach Boys, dies of cancer in the US, aged 51.
1999 — The public gets to see and hear Monica Lewinsky as excerpts of the former White House intern’s videotaped testimony are shown at President Clinton’s impeachment trial.
2006 — Anger over cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed spills violently onto the streets of Afghanistan, as protesters direct their anger against the US.
2011 — Seventy-one homes are lost as a bushfire sweeps through Perth suburbs.
2013 -Federal MP Craig Thomson appears in a Melbourne court on 154 charges of fraud allegedly committed while he was an official of the Health Services Union official.
2015 — West Australian Liberal MPS Luke Simpkins and Don Randall commence a spill motion against Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
2016 — An al Qaeda affiliate frees Jocelyn Elliott, an Australian woman kidnapped in Burkina Faso along with her husband.
Today’s Birthdays: Queen Anne of England (1665-1714); Sir Henry Irving, English actor (1838-1905); Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress (1918-1945); Bob Marley, Jamaican musician (1945-1981); Axl Rose, US rock singer (1962-)