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 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 Jon Benet 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 amillion 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-).