Today in history
1868 – The Maori religious leader and guerilla, Te Kooti, leads a raid on the Matawhero settlement in Poverty Bay, killing 60 in a revenge attack for indignities he suffered after being taken prisoner three years earlier.
1871 – American journalist Henry Stanley finds African explorer Dr David Livingstone in Ujiji, central Africa, on Lake Tanganyika; delivers his famous greeting ‘‘Dr Livingstone I presume?’’
1885 – The son of German engineer Otto Daimler becomes the first motorcyclist, riding his father’s invention 10 kilometers.
1928 – Hirohito is enthroned as Emperor of Japan.
1987 – Niger’s President Seyni Kountche dies in Paris, and is replaced as head of state by army chief Ali Seibou.
1988 – Soldiers open fire and kill at least 15 people in Sri Lanka when antigovernment demonstrators defy a curfew.
1991 – Street fighting rages between Serbs and Croats struggling for control of Danube River town of Vukovar.
1992 – UN weapons inspectors in Baghdad remove 200 drums containing uranium from an Iraqi atomic facility.
1998 – A jury in New York City convicts Corey Arthur, 20, of seconddegree murder in the 1997 torture and murder of Jonathan Levin, his former high-school English teacher. Levin was the son of Gerald Levin, the chairman of Time Warner Inc.
2000 – Philippine President Joseph Estrada denies new corruption allegations that he received a $20 million kickback from the sale of the country’s largest telephone company and pocketed more than $16 million from a controversial stock sale.
2006 – Zimbabwe’s government launches a program to issue 99-year leases to black farmers allocated land seized mostly from white farmers.
2007 – Six US troops are killed when insurgents ambush their foot patrol in the high mountains of eastern Afghanistan — the most lethal attack against American forces this year, making 2007 the deadliest year for US troops in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion.
2010 – President Barack Obama tells global leaders in Seoul, South Korea, the burden is on them as well as the US to fix trade-stifling imbalances and currency disputes that imperil economic recoveries everywhere.
Today’s birthdays: Martin Luther, German leader of the Reformation (1483-1546); Francois Couperin, French composer (1668-1733); Friedrich von Schiller, German author (1759-1805); Oliver Goldsmith, Irish author (1728-1774); Richard Burton, British actor (1925-1984); Brittany Murphy, US actress (1977-2009).