Today in history
Today is Tuesday, February 12, the 43rd day of 2019. There are 322 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1554 — Lady Jane Grey is executed for treason in
England.
1577 — Don Juan de Austria, the new Governor of the Netherlands, issues an edict to settle the civil war.
1610 — King Henry IV, of France, signs an alliance
with the German Protestant Union.
1689 — The Declaration of Rights in England is finalised, in which absolute power is stripped from the monarchy and given to Parliament.
1736 — Nader Shah becomes king of Persia.
1840 — LieutenantGovernor William Hobson meets a large group of Maori at Hokianga, and after assuring them the Queen seeks only sovereignty and not their land, gains the support and signatures to the Treaty of Waitangi of a further 64 chiefs.
1846 — HMS Driver becomes the first steam
vessel to enter Wellington Harbour.
1878 — The first sale at Dunedin’s Burnside yards
takes place.
1899 — Germany buys the Mariana Islands and
most of the Caroline Islands from Spain.
1908 — The first roundtheworld car race begins
in New York.
1909 — SS Penguin is wrecked off Cape
Terawhiti in Cook Strait with the loss of 75 lives.
1918 — Dunedin’s John McGlashan College
opens.
1924 — Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus is opened to reveal his coffin, 15 months after the tomb was first discovered.
1929 — Death of Lillie Langtry (Emilie Charlotte Le
Breton), actress and King Edward VII’s mistress.
1940 — The radio play The Adventures of
Superman debuts in the US with Bud Collyer as the Man of Steel.
1974 — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Soviet Nobel Prize winner, is arrested at his Moscow apartment and exiled the following day.
1986 — The Channel Tunnel treaty between Britain
and France is signed.
1993 — Two 10yearold boys lure 2yearold James Bulger from his mother at a shopping mall in Liverpool, England, and beat him to death.
1994 — Norwegian Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream is stolen from a museum in Oslo; lawyers acting for US figureskater Tonya Harding and the US Olympic Committee agree to settle a lawsuit brought by the skater, allowing her to skate at the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway; more than 100 people trek the 50km subterranean Channel Tunnel in a sponsored walk for charity, becoming the first humans to walk from France to Britain since the Ice Age.
1996 — Yasser Arafat takes office as the first
Palestinian president.
1997 — Hwang Jang Yop, a confidant of North Korean leader Kim Jongil, defects in Beijing and seeks asylum in South Korea.
2002 — New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark offers the New Zealand Chinese community an official apology for the poll tax imposed by the Chinese Immigrants Act 1881. Set as an entry tax on Chinese immigrants, it was initially set at £10, but increased to £100 in 1896. Although waived from 1934, the legislation was not repealed until 1944; The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring receives 13 Academy Award nominations.
2011 — Swarms of shoppers flock back to the
Christchurch CBD as part of a belated Boxing Day promotion to encourage people back into the central city, following earthquakes on September 4 and December 26 that closed the area until all buildings were cleared of structural safety concerns.
Today’s birthdays:
Charles Darwin, English scientist (18091882); Abraham Lincoln, US president (18091865); Walter Nash, 27th prime minister of New Zealand (18821968); Sir Humphrey O’Leary, seventh chief justice of New Zealand (18861953); Judy Blume, US author (1938); Bruno Lawrence, New Zealand musician/actor (19411995); Ross Morgan, New Zealand cricketer (1941); Joanna Kerns, US actress (1953); Sigrid Thornton, Australian actress (1959); Chynna Phillips, US singer/actress (1968); Stu Forster, All Black (1969); Christian Cullen,
All Black (1976); Joshua Stick, New Zealand football international (1980); Christina Ricci, US actress (1980); Ashwath Sundarasen, New Zealand actor (1986).
Quote from history:
‘‘This is not Johnson’s war. This is America’s war. If I drop dead tomorrow, this war will still be with you.’’ — Lyndon B. Johnson, US president, on the Vietnam War. On February 12, 1973, North Vietnam freed the first group of US prisoners of war.