Today in History

1606 – First record of a performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear, before James I at Whitehall Palace.

1860 – The first club match under the new rules of association football is played in Sheffield, northern England, between Hallam FC and Sheffield FC.

1865 – US inventor James Mason receives a patent for the coffee percolator.

1879 – Irish Catholic gangs attack Protestant marchers in Christchurch, and surround a similar procession in Timaru.

1972 – Death of former US president Harry S Truman.

1982 – Time magazine picks the personal computer as its first non-human Man of the Year.

1985 – Conservationist Dian Fossey, above, is found murdered in the mountains of Rwanda, where she studied gorillas and campaigned against poaching.

1989 – Forces loyal to the Romanian communist government begin surrendering as TV shows the bodies of executed leader Nicolae Ceausescu and wife Elena.

1996 – Six-year-old beauty pageant contestant JonBenet Ramsey is found dead in the basement of her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado.

1997 – French far-Right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen is convicted by a court in Paris of denying Nazi crimes after he said the gas chambers were a ‘‘detail’’ of history.

2003 – An earthquake in Iranian city of Bam kills at least 26,000 people and destroys about 80 per cent of the city’s homes.

2004 – A massive tsunami triggered by an earthquake off Sumatra, Indonesia, tears across the Indian Ocean, devastating coastal communities in 12 Asian countries, killing at least 220,000 people, and leaving more than a million homeless.

2006 – A ruptured petrol pipeline explodes near Nigeria’s main city, Lagos, killing an estimated 260 people.

Birthdays

Charles Babbage, UK mathematician (17911871); Mao Zedong, Chinese politician (18931976); Temuera Morrison, NZ actor (1960-); Jason Gunn, NZ TV host (1968-); Danielle Cormack, NZ actor (1970-); Jared Leto, US actor (1971-); Kit Harington, UK actor (1986-).