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 United States 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 crewmembers.

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 Georgewbush.

2003 – Germany says it will build a national memorial to homosexuals persecuted or killed under the Nazis, complementing the planned German memorial to the 6million 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 after being mistaken for a suicide bomber.

2009 – Emails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled sceptics 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).