Today in history
Today is Friday, October 26, the 299th day of 2018. There are 66 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1863 — Albert Pomare is the first Maori to be born in England. Queen Victoria is his godmother; the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce opens.
1866 — The Tuapeka Jockey Club is formed.
1876 — The Dunedin to Ocean Beach Railway is
opened.
1881 — The gunfight at the OK Corral takes place in Tombstone, Arizona, when Wyatt Earp, his two brothers and Doc Holliday confront Ike Clanton’s gang.
1942 — The Women Jurors Act comes into effect, but New Zealand women do not begin sitting on juries until almost a year later.
1955 — The Republic of South Vietnam is
proclaimed under Ngo Dinh Diem.
1956 — The Otago Daily Times receives its first
wire photo.
1962 — Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev offers to withdraw missiles from Cuba if the United
States removes bases in Turkey, but is rebuffed.
1971 — The last regular maintrunk service by a
steam locomotive in New Zealand has its final run.
1976 — The Minister of Works and Developmenmt breaks ground on the Maniototo Irrigation Scheme, 80 years after it was first proposed.
1977 — Twotime New Zealand prime minister
Sir Keith Holyoake becomes GovernorGeneral. 1979 — South Korea’s President Park ChungHee is slain by his lifelong friend Kim Jae Kyu, the head of the Korean intelligence agency.
1985 — The Mutijuli Aboriginal Community is granted freehold title to Ayers Rock and Uluru National Park in the Northern Territory.
1994 — Israel and Jordan sign a treaty, ending 46
years of hostility.
1995 — Russian president Boris Yeltsin is hospitalised in Moscow with an apparent heart attack, the second in four months.
1996 — As eastern Zaire slides into chaos, the United Nations evacuates aid workers from a camp in Bukavu, leaving halfamillion Hutu refugees from Rwanda to fend for themselves.
1999 — Britain’s House of Lords votes to end the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in Britain’s upper chamber of Parliament.
2000 — An Ilyushin18 aircraft ploughs into a mountain in exSoviet Georgia, killing more than 80 people.
2001 — Abdul Haq, veteran Afghan opposition commander, is captured and executed by Taliban troops while on a mission inside Afghanistan to gather support for a peace plan.
2002 — Almost 130 of a total of 750 hostages are killed when Russian special forces storm a Moscow theatre at dawn to end a threeday siege by Chechen rebels. Only two died of gunshot wounds, the rest by gas poisoning. Some 40 guerrillas were also killed.
2003 — Health insurer Anthem Inc acquires Well Point Health Networks Inc in a $US16.4billion cashandstock deal. The acquisition creates the largest US health insurance company, with 26million members in its health plans.
2004 — Nasa’s Cassini orbiter begins transmitting data and images of Saturn’s moon Titan, providing humans with their closest look at the mysterious moon.
2006 — Women in India are for the first time given legal protection from abuse endured in their own homes, and a right to compensation, under a new law. 2011 — Ground movement is believed to be the cause of a 13cm crack in the damaged
Maui pipeline 2.5m underground in rural Taranaki, forcing milk to be dumped and all gasreliant businesses to cease operating.
Today’s birthdays:
Mahalia Jackson, US gospel singer (19111972); Jaclyn Smith, US actress (1945); Keith Hopwood, English musician (1946); Hillary Rodham Clinton, US politician (1947); Alan Duff, New Zealand author (1950); Keith Strickland, US musican (1953); Rita Wilson, US actress (1956); Brian Bovell, English actor (1959); Natalie Merchant, US singer (1963); Ken Rutherford, New Zealand cricket captain (1965); Keith Urban, New Zealandborn country singer (1967); Jan Logie, New Zealand politician (1969); Craig Dowd, All Black (1969); Ricky Cockerill, New Zealand figure skater (1978); Kieran Read, All Black captain (1985); Harrison Hansen, New Zealand rugby league international (1985).
Thought for today:
Each child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man. — Sir Rabindranath Tagore, Indian Nobel Prizewinning poet (18611941).