Today in history
Today is Saturday, October 26, the 299th day of 2019. There are 66 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1850 — Irish explorer Robert McClure sights the fabled Northwest Passage for the first time (from Banks Island towards Melville Island).
1863 — Albert Pomare is the first Maori to be born in England. Queen Victoria becomes 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 Development 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.
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 26 million 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 gas reliant businesses to cease operating.