Today in history

1769 - French explorer Jean Francois Marie de Surville sights land – the Hokianga area – while sailing around the northern tip of New Zealand, shortly after the explorations of James Cook.

1800 - Washington DC is established as the capital of the United States.

1804 - Spain declares war on Britain.

1870 - Joseph Rainey of South Carolina takes his seat in the US House of Representatives, becoming the first black congressman.

1899 - African-american George Grant receives the first patent for a golf tee.

1913 - The Mona Lisa is recovered in Italy, two years after it was stolen from the Louvre museum in Paris.

1920 - Martial law is declared in Cork, Ireland.

1953 - US test pilot Chuck Yeager reaches Mach 2.3 (2.3 times the speed of sound) in a Bell X-1A rocket plane.

1961 - New Zealand’s first Golden Kiwi lottery is drawn, introduced by the Government to tap the public’s growing enthusiasm for lotteries.

1975 - Sara Jane Moore pleads guilty to trying to kill US President Gerald Ford.

1985 - An Arrow Air charter flight crashes after takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland, killing 248 American soldiers and eight crew members.

1989 - British begin forced repatriation of Vietnamese refugees from camps in Hong Kong.

1999 - New Zealander Leilani Joyce wins the British Open squash title.

2000 - The US Supreme Court reverses the Florida Supreme Court’s order to begin manual recounts of presidential votes in certain counties and Democrat Al Gore concedes defeat to Republican George W Bush.

2003 - Germany says it will build a national memorial to homosexuals persecuted or killed under the Nazis, complementing the planned German memorial to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.

2004 - New Zealand’s master athletics coach, Arthur Lydiard, dies of a heart attack aged 87, while on a lecture tour in the US.

2008 - A British jury decides that a string of police failures caused the death of a Brazilian electrician shot by anti-terror police on July 22, after being mistaken for a suicide bomber.

2009 - Emails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data – but the messages do not support claims that the science of global warming was faked.

Today’s birthdays: John Jay, US revolutionary (1745-1829); Edvard Munch, Norwegian artist (1863-1944); Frank Sinatra, US singer/actor (1915-1998).