Today in history
1190 — Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa drowns trying to cross the Saleph River in Cilicia (now in Turkey) while on the Third Crusade to free Jerusalem.
1793 — First public zoo, the Jardin des Plantes, opens in Paris.
1794 — Power of French revolutionary tribunals is increased, leading to mass executions.
1906 — Death of Richard John Seddon, prime minister of New Zealand (1893-1906).
1908 — Australia’s federal parliament passes the Invalid and Old-age Pensions Act, offering means-tested financial support to the elderly and infirm.
1917 — Sinn Fein riots break out in Dublin.
1941 — Recruiting begins for the Torres Strait Defence Force.
1943 — Hungarian journalist Laszlo Biro patents his ball-point pen.
1988 — Riot police in South Korea block thousands of students trying to march to North Korea for reunification talks.
1997 — Top Khmer Rouge lieutenant Son Sen and his family are executed on the orders of leader Pol Pot.
1998 — President Nursultan Nazarbayev formally opens Kazakhstan’s new capital city Astana.
2002 — India reopens its airspace to Pakistani commercial flights, showing the first signs that it is ready to ease the standoff over the border shared by the two nations in Kashmir.
2003 — Former Lebanon hostage Terry Waite, 64, who was chained to the wall of a Beirut cell for nearly five years, agrees to spend a day in a British prison to raise money for charity.
2008 — The chief of Saddam Hussein’s tribal clan is killed by a bomb glued to the undercarriage of his car.
2010 — Pope Benedict XVI strongly defends celibacy for priests as a sign of faith in an increasingly secular world during a rally that draws some 15,000 priests from around the world to Rome.
2013 — Bombs explode across Iraq, killing at least 70 people.
2014 — Jihadist followers of the alqaeda splinter group ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) seize Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in a spectacular blow to the Shi’ite-led government of Nuri al-maliki; Australia Post says it will cut 900 jobs over the next year.
2016 — Mourners line the streets of Muhammad Ali’s hometown of Louisville to farewell the boxing great who died the week before, aged 74.
Today’s Birthdays: Gustave Courbet, French artist (1819-1877); Nikolaus August Otto, German developer of internal combustion engine (1832-1891); Henry Stanley, English explorer (1840-1904); Maurice Sendak, author of Where The Wild Things Are (1928-2012).