Today in history
1567 — Henry Darnley, consort of Mary Queen of Scots, is murdered.
1763 — France cedes Canada and India to England as Treaty of Paris is signed, ending French and Indian Wars.
1840 — Britain’s Queen Victoria marries Prince Albert of Saxe-coburggotha.
1879 — Outlaw Ned Kelly holds up Jerilderie post office in New South Wales.
1933 — The first singing telegram is introduced by the Postal Telegram Company in New York.
1942 — Glenn Miller receives the first-ever gold disc for selling 1 million copies of Chattanooga Choo Choo.
1949 — Arthur Miller’s play Death Of A Salesman opens at New York’s Morosco Theatre.
1962 — The Soviet Union exchanges captured American U-II pilot Francis Gary Powers for Rudolph Ivanovich Abel, a Soviet spy held by the United States.
1990 — South African President FW de Klerk announces that black activist Nelson Mandela will be released after 27 years in captivity.
1992 — Heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson is convicted in Indianapolis of raping Desiree Washington, a Miss Black America contestant.
1993 — Fred Hollows, New Zealand ophthalmologist and humanitarian who restored sight to thousands of underprivileged people, dies in Sydney of cancer, aged 63.
1996 — An IBM computer called Deep Blue makes chess history by comfortably beating world champion Garry Kasparov – a machine’s first victory under classic tournament rules.
1997 — A civil jury heaps US$25 million in punitive damages on OJ Simpson for the killings of his ex-wife and her friend.
2000 — All 164 passengers held hostage on an Afghan airliner during a tense four-day journey across Central Asia and Europe, exit the plane.
2005 — North Korea boasts publicly for the first time that it has nuclear weapons.
2007 — General David Petraeus takes command of US and multinational troops in Iraq, succeeding General George W Casey Jr.
2009 — US and Russian communication satellites collide in the first-ever crash of its kind in orbit, shooting out a pair of massive debris clouds.
2014 — Convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby is released from Kerobokan jail more than nine years after she was arrested for smuggling 4.2 kilograms of cannabis in a boogie board bag to Bali; Former child star Shirley Temple dies, aged 85. Today’s Birthdays:
Mark Spitz, US swimmer (1950-); Laura Dern, US actor (1967-).