Today in History

1642 – Dutch mariner Abel Tasman, right, becomes the first European to sight New Zealand.

1918 – United States President Woodrow Wilson arrives in France, becoming the first chief executive to visit Europe while in office.

1937 – Japanese troops take Nanking in China and proceed to massacre an estimated 300,000 Chinese civilians.

1942 – The Battle of the River Plate begins off South America, with the HMS Achilles becoming the first New Zealand warship to take part in a naval battle.

1957 – An estimated 1062 people are killed by an earthquake in western Iran. Farsinaj, a village at the epicentre, is destroyed.

1989 – South African President FW de Klerk meets for the first time with imprisoned African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, at de Klerk’s office in Cape Town.

2001 – New Zealand’s air force Skyhawks stage their final flights, marking the end of the country’s air-strike capacity.

2003 – US forces capture former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in a small underground hideout near the Iraqi city of Tikrit.

2007 – European Union leaders sign the Lisbon Treaty, a slimmeddown version of the aborted EU constitution. The 50-article charter creates the post of EU president and overhauls voting rules.

2009 – An attacker hurls a statuette at Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, hitting the 73year-old in the face and leaving him with a broken nose.

Birthdays

Henry IV of France (1553-1610); Dick Van Dyke, US actor (1925-); Christopher Plummer, Canadian actor (1929-); Leighton Smith, Australian-born NZ talkback host (1947-); Ruth Richardson, former NZ finance minister (1950-); Ben Bernanke, US economist (1953-); Wayne Shelford, All Black (1957-); Jamie Foxx, US actor (1967-); Taylor Swift, American singer (1989-).