Today in history
1340 - Edward III of England declares himself king of France, a claim that leads to the Hundred Years’ War.
1731 - Death of Bartolomeo Cristofori, Italian harpsichord manufacturer generally credited with the invention of the piano.
1880 - American inventor Thomas Edison receives a patent for his electric incandescent lamp.
1926 - Scottish inventor John Logie Baird displays his first television images.
1944 - Soviet city of Leningrad is liberated from Germans.
1951 - Era of atomic testing in the Nevada desert begins as a United States Air Force plane drops a onekiloton bomb on Frenchman Flats.
1962 - Twenty-three-year-old Olympic 800-metre champion Peter Snell hoped to run the first fourminute mile on New Zealand soil. In fact, he broke Australian Herb Elliott’s world record at Whanganui’s Cooks Gardens. Snell’s time was 3 minutes and 54.4 seconds.
1967 - US, Soviet Union and 60 other nations sign treaty to limit military activities in outer space.
1991 - President Mohamed Siad Barre of Somalia flees the capital, Mogadishu, as a coalition of rebels seize power and the country plunges into anarchy.
1995 - Burmese soldiers capture the base of Burma’s largest Karen rebel army in the Burmese jungle.
1998 - The Catholic Church in Germany stops issuing certificates allowing abortions.
2000 - A United Nations court in Tanzania sentences former Rwanda tea factory boss Alfred Musema to life imprisonment for genocide.
2002 - More than 1000 people die when a munitions depot in Lagos, Nigeria, explodes.
2005 - Peru’s former spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos sentenced to eight years’ prison for paying tabloids to run smear campaigns against opponents of former president Alberto Fujimori.
2006 - Death of former German President Johannes Rau, a prominent figure in post-war German politics, aged 75.
2008 - Guyana deploys security forces in villages and forests surrounding Lusignan, where on January 26 rampaging gunmen killed 11 people, including five children.
2010 - Reports emerge that former Australian soldier Robert William Langdon, 38, faces execution in Afghanistan after being convicted for the shooting murder of a local security guard in May 2009 that he tried to blame on the Taliban.
Today’s Birthdays:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian composer (1756-1791); Lewis Carroll, English novelist (1832-1898); Mimi Rogers, US actress (1956-); Shane Thomson, New Zealand cricketer (1969-); Rosamund Pike, English actress (1979-).