Today in history
1205 – In England, John Grey, Bishop of Norwich, is elected Archbishop of Canterbury.
1282 – Death of Michael VIII Palaeologus, Byzantine emperor; Llewelyn, the last native-born Prince of Wales, is killed in a battle with the English near Aber Edw.
1816 – Britain restores Java, Indonesia, to the Netherlands.
1907 – Fire destroys much of New Zealand’s Parliament buildings, although the parliamentary library survives.
1946 – The UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) is established.
1967 – Prototype of the Anglofrench supersonic aircraft Concorde is shown for the first time at Toulouse, France.
1982 – South Australia’s first testtube baby, Matthew James Wooton, is born one week premature in an Adelaide hospital.
1989 – Celebrations replace threatened general strike in Czechoslovakia as president Gustav Husak is driven from office.
1990 – Albania announces it will allow formation of independent political parties.
1992 – The UN Security Council authorises immediate deployment of up to 800 peacekeepers in Macedonia to prevent strife in the Balkans from engulfing a larger region.
1996 – Shipping tycoon Tung Chee-hwa is elected the first postcolonial leader of Hong Kong; Incumbent Jerry Rawlings is declared the winner in Ghana’s presidential election.
2003 – A presidential panel concludes that France should outlaw Islamic head scarves in public schools to halt the burgeoning influence of Muslim fundamentalism.
2006 – Former Fijian military leader and prime minister Sitiveni Rabuka is found not guilty of two charges of inciting a 2000 mutiny.
2007 – Two truck bombs shear off the fronts of UN offices and a government building in Algeria’s capital, killing at least 31 people and wounding nearly 200 in an attack claimed by Al-qaida in Islamic North Africa.
2010 – North Korea warns that it is ready for an all-out war even as it dispatches its top diplomat to Russia amid a flurry of regional diplomatic efforts to defuse tensions over the North’s deadly artillery attack on South Korea.
2011 – A UN climate conference reaches a hard-fought agreement on a far-reaching program meant to set a new course for the global fight against climate change.
Today’s Birthdays:
Hector Berlioz, French composer (1803-1869); Alfred de Musset, French author (1810-1857); Mark Greatbatch, New Zealand cricketer and coach (1963-).