Today in history
1492 – Explorer Christopher Columbus founds a European settlement on the island of Hispaniola.
1865 – American inventor James Nason receives patent for the coffee percolator.
1956 – Twenty-one African Americans are arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, for riding in the ‘‘white’’ sections of buses during amass defiance of laws requiring separation of the races on public transportation.
1962 – Eight East Germans escape to West Berlin by crashing a bus through barriers at border checkpoint.
1971 – Sixteen Vietnamwar veterans seize the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour to dramatise their antiwar stand.
1989 – Forces loyal to the Romanian communist government begin surrendering as a videotape aired on television shows the bloody bodies of executed leader Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena.
1995 – Sri Lankan off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan is no-balled for throwing by controversial umpire Darrell Hair in Boxing Day cricket match against Australia at the MCG, Melbourne.
1997 – French far-right politician Jean-marie Le Pen is convicted of denying Nazi crimes after he said the gas chambers were a ‘‘historic detail’’ at amunich news conference.
1998 – Khmer Rouge leaders Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, considered to be among the architects of the group’s genocidal reign in the 1970s, surrender to the government.
2002 – The United States State Department verifies reports that the Burma military had carried out mass rapes as part of a campaign from 1996 to 2001 to suppress an ethnic insurgency in Shan state.
2003 – An earthquake rocks the Iranian city of Bam, 980 kilometres southeast of the capital Tehran, killing 50,000 people and destroying 90 per cent of the city’s residential area.
2004 – Amassive tsunami triggered by earthquakes tears across the Indian Ocean, devastating coastal communities in 12 Asian countries, killing at least 216,000 people and leaving more than amillion people homeless.
2007 – A ruptured gasoline pipeline explodes in flames, killing at least 34 people near Nigeria’s main city of Lagos.
2012 – Russia moves toward finalising a ban on Americans adopting Russian children.
Today’s birthdays:
Charles Babbage, English mathematician and inventor of first computer (1791-1871); Mao Zedong, Chinese leader (1893-1976); Phil Spector, American music producer (1939-); Lars Ulrich, American drummer with Metallica (1963-); Matthewwade, Australian cricketer (1987-); Yohan Blake, Jamaican sprinter (1989-).