Today in history
Today is Wednesday, February 13, the 44th day of 2019. There are 321 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1542 — England’s Queen Catherine Howard is executed for treason on the orders of her husband, Henry VIII.
1601 — Sir James Lancaster VI leads the first East
India Company voyage from London.
1633 — Italian astronomer Galileo arrives in Rome and is detained by the Roman Catholic
Inquisition.
1689 — The English Parliament adopts a bill of
rights.
1820 — Duc de Berry, heir presumptive to the
French throne, is assassinated by an antiroyalist.
1856 — Britain annexes Oudh, increasing Indian
hostility to British rule.
1861 — Francis II of Naples, king of the two Sicilies, surrenders at Gaeta to Giuseppe Garibaldi.
1869 — The Rev John Whiteley and seven other European settlers are murdered at White Cliffs, Taranaki.
1874 — The Mongol, the first direct steamship from Great Britain, arrives at Port Chalmers and is immediately quarantined on account of scarlet fever, measles, and bronchitis on board. Fifteen children and one adult had died en route.
1931 — An aftershock measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale rocks the Hawke’s Bay region in one of many tremors to plague the region since the destructive earthquake 10 days earlier.
1945 — Allied bombers begin bombing the German city of Dresden, in the first of four raids over two days that destroy over 90% of the city and kill approximately 25,000 civilians.
1961 — The United Nations Security Council urges
the use of force to prevent civil war in the Congo.
1968 — Ten thousand US troops are prepared for transportation to South Vietnam as the war escalates in that country.
1975 — The New Zealand Post Office admits there are no detector vans travelling the country to catch people who have not paid their broadcasting licence.
1976 — Nigerian junta leader General Murtala Ramat Muhammed is assassinated in a coup attempt.
1980 — New Zealand beats the West Indies by one wicket in a dramatic cricket test match at Carisbrook.
1981 — Some 800 pigs and a pet sheep are slaughtered and burned on a farm near Temuka in a suspected outbreak of footandmouth. It is later discovered that some of the pigs had developed blisters on their snouts due to diet and not as a result of footandmouth.
1989 — The Soviet Red Army leaves the Afghan
capital of Kabul.
1990 — Large crowds give Nelson Mandela a hero’s welcome on his return to the township of Soweto after his release from prison.
1991 — US planes destroy a bunker in Baghdad that allies had identified as a military site, but apparently contained civilians, with the reported death toll ranging from 40 to 500.
1992 — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat claims a tape in which he purportedly made slanderous comments about Jews was doctored.
1993 — Angolan government troops break into the Unita rebelheld highlands in an attempt to open a supply corridor to the embattled city of Huambo.
1995 — Peru announces it has captured the last Ecuadoran stronghold in Peruvian territory and declares a unilateral ceasefire in the Andean border war. 2002 — The Scottish Parliament votes to ban foxhunting, making Scotland the first part of Britain to ban the centuriesold sport.
2008 — Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd makes a formal apology to the Aboriginal people and the stolen generation.
2012 — A sleeping teenager is rescued by a friend who scaled the wall to the second floor of Dunedin’s Kingsgate Hotel, in Smith St, when fire breaks out in a vacant room on the floor above him.
Today’s birthdays:
Chuck Yeager, US test pilot (1923); Kim Novak, US actress (1933); George Segal, US actor (1934); Oliver Reed, British actor (19381999); Carol Lynley, US actress (1942); Peter Tork, US musician (1942); Stockard Channing, US actress (1944); Jerry Springer, US talkshow host (1944); Peter Gabriel, British musician (1950); Matt Salinger, US actor (1960); Robbie Williams, British singer (1974); Daniel Braid, All Black (1981).
Thought for today:
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason. — C.S. Lewis, English author (18981963).