Today in history
1711 - The plague breaks out in Copenhagen.
1915 - The evacuation of Allied troops begins at Gallipoli in Turkey, with New Zealand leaving more than 2700 dead at the end of the disastrous eight-month campaign.
1939 - The motion picture Gone With the Wind premieres in Atlanta, in the United States.
1944 - The plane carrying American band leader Glenn Miller, a United States Army Major, disappears over the English Channel, probably the victim of bombs jettisoned from British bombers returning from an unsuccessful raid.
1944 - New Zealand’s Parliament abolishes a discriminatory poll tax against Chinese people, in place since 1881 and described by finance minister Walter Nash as ‘‘a blot on our legislation’’.
1952 - China rejects India’s plan for Korean armistice.
1961 - Former Nazi Adolf Eichmann is sentenced to death in Jerusalem.
1965 - Two US manned spacecraft, Gemini 6 and Gemini 7, manoeuvre to within three metres of each other while in orbit and relay data about Venus as it flies past the planet.
1970 - Soviet spacecraft starts sending messages from planet Venus.
1992 - Chess genius Bobby Fischer is indicted in the United States on charges of violating economic sanctions against Yugoslavia by playing a highly publicised match with Boris Spassky.
1993 - Offering the Irish Republican Army a chance that ‘‘might never come their way again’’, British and Irish leaders sign a complex framework for negotiating peace in Northern Ireland.
1995 - Pioneer 6, a spacecraft launched on a journey through the solar system on December 16, 1965, gets an early happy birthday call from NASA and answers back.
1998 - Northern Ireland’s most ruthless Protestant paramilitary group, the Loyalist Volunteer Force, promises to start disarming by Christmas.
2003 - A 17-member federal commission on terrorism, created by the US Congress in 1998 in response to attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, issues its final report, stating the Department of Homeland Security failed to give sufficient instruction on how to foil terrorism.
2010 - Police detain more than 1000 people in Moscow and several other Russian cities after weekend rioting in the capital between racist hooligans and mostly Muslim ethnic minorities left dozens injured.
Today’s birthdays: Nero, Roman emperor (AD 37-AD 68); J Paul Getty, US oil tycoon (1892-1976); Maurice Wilkins, Nz-born English molecular biologist (1916-2004).