Today in history
1477 - William Caxton produces the first printed book in the English language, The Dictes and Sayengis of the Phylosophers.
1820 - United States Navy Captain Nathaniel Palmer discovers Antarctica.
1903 - United States and Panama sign treaty granting US rights to build Panama Canal.
1910 - The Mexican Revolution breaks out.
1916 - In World War I, General Douglas Haig calls off the first Battle of the Somme after five months of futile battle including the first use of tanks.
1918 - Belgian army reoccupies Brussels after four years of German occupation.
1928 - Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse makes his debut at the Colony Theatre in New York in a film called Steamboat Willie.
1976 - Spain’s parliament approves a bill to establish a democracy after 37 years of dictatorship.
1978 - US pastor Jim Jones leads 914 of his followers to their deaths at Jonestown, Guyana, by drinking a cyanide-laced fruit drink; cult members who refused to swallow it were shot.
1987 - Some 31 people die at Kings Cross station on the London Underground in a fire that starts on a wooden escalator.
1993 - Black and white leaders in South Africa approve a new democratic constitution which gives blacks the vote and ends white minority rule.
1995 - The Vatican says the Roman Catholic ban on the ordination of women as priests is a definitive, infallible and unquestionable part of the Church’s doctrine.
2003 - The Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts rules the state cannot deny homosexuals the right to marry, making Massachusetts the first US state to recognise gay marriage.
2007 - A methane blast rips through a coal mine in eastern Ukraine, killing at least 70 miners.
2011 - Tens of thousands of Islamists and young activists mass in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, confronting Egypt’s ruling military council with the largest crowd in months to protest the generals’ attempt to give themselves special powers over a future elected government.
2013 - Toronto’s city council votes to strip scandal-plagued Mayor Rob Ford of many of his powers following a heated debate in which he knocked over a female councillor.
Today’s Birthdays:
William Hogarth, English artist (1697-1764); Carl von Weber, German pianist-composer (1786-1826); Kirk Hammett, US guitarist of Metallica fame (1962-); Owen Wilson, US actor (1968-); Chloe Sevigny, US actress (1974-).