Today in History

– The first known African slaves are sold in North America. About 20 Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrive in the British colony of Virginia and are bought by colonists.

– United States President Andrew Johnson formally declares the American Civil War over, even though fighting had stopped months earlier.

– First performance of the 1812 Overture, by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, in Moscow.

– Great Britain wins gold in the only cricket match in Olympic history. The team beat France – the only other side taking part in the tournament – in Paris.

– A cartoon is published in which a kiwi morphs into a moa as the All Blacks defeat Great Britain 9-3. It may have been the first use of a kiwi as a national symbol.

– German army captures Brussels during initial German invasion of World War I.

– New Zealand shipping company freighter Turakina is intercepted and sunk 500km off Taranaki by German raider Orion, with the loss of 36 lives; Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky is attacked with an axe in Mexico by an agent of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. He dies the following day.

– About 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5000 tanks invade Czechoslovakia to crush the ‘‘Prague Spring’’.

– Viking 1, a US robotic spacecraft, built to explore the surface of Mars, is launched and nearly a year later lands on the planet.

– Fifty-one people die as a pleasure boat sinks in the Thames in London after colliding with a dredger.

– A collision between two trains in northern India kills 358 people.

– Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted over the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people, is released from prison on compassionate grounds owing to ill health.

– A court in Pakistan indicts former president Pervez Musharraf on murder charges stemming from the slaying of exprime minister Benazir Bhutto. – Indian teacher B.K.S. Iyengar, who helped popularise yoga in the West, dies at the age of 95.

– New Zealand golfer Lydia Ko, above, wins silver at the Rio Olympic Games.

– China changes its Population and Family Planning Law to allow couples to legally have a third child, six years after the law had been changed to allow a second child amid a plummeting birthrate.

Birthdays

Sir James Carroll, NZ politician (1857-1926); Jim Reeves, US singer (1923-64); Don King, US boxing promoter (1931-); Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian president (1941-2006); Isaac Hayes, US singer (1942-2008); Rajiv Gandhi, Indian prime minister (1944-91); Robert Plant, UK singer (1948-); David Walliams, UK comedian (1971-); Amy Adams, US actor (1974-); Andrew Garfield, US actor (1983-); Demi Lovato, US singer (1992-).