Today in history
1663 – Canada becomes royal province of France.
1797 – British fleet under John Jervis Sand Horatio Nelson defeat Spanish off Cape St Vincent.
1893 – Hawaii is annexed by treaty to United States.
1915 – New Zealand sends a ‘‘native contingent’’ of 500 soldiers to Egypt as part of the country’s war effort, the first use of Maori troops by the government.
1922 – Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi begins the first regular radio broadcasting transmission from England.
1929 – Seven hoodlums, rivals of the Al Capone gang in Chicago, Illinois, are murdered in what becomes known as the St Valentine’s Day Massacre.
1946 – A machine at the University of Pennsylvania takes seconds to do calculations that normally take hours. It was called ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.
1989 – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran sentences British author Salman Rushdie to death for allegedly insulting Islam, sending him into hiding for years.
1998 – New Zealand’s new national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, opens in Wellington.
1998 – Milan Simic and Miroslav Tadic become the first Bosnian Serb suspects to turn themselves in voluntarily to the UN war crimes tribunal.
2000 – Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid suspends his powerful security minister, General Wiranto, from the Cabinet over his alleged role in the bloodshed in East Timor during 1999.
2002 – Enron executive Sherron Watkins tells a House subcommittee it was common knowledge at the company that partnerships were used improperly to hide debt and inflate profits.
2003 – The world’s first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, is given a lethal injection after developing signs of progressive lung disease. She was six.
2004 – Saadoun Hammadi, a longtime ally of Saddam Hussein who served as Iraq’s prime minister after the 1991 Gulf War, is freed by US forces after nine months in custody.
2008 – Rival factions in Kenya’s political crisis agree to write a new constitution, a move that could allow for power-sharing as part of a deal aimed at ending weeks of violence.
2011 – The number of monarch butterflies migrating from Canada and the US to Mexico increases this year, a hopeful sign following a worrying 75 per cent drop in their numbers last year.
Today’s Birthdays: Carl Bernstein, US (Watergate) journalist (1944-); Manuela Maleeva, Bulgarianborn Swiss tennis player (1967-); Simon Pegg, English actor and comedian (1970-).