Today in History

1492 – Christopher Columbus founds a European settlement on the island of Hispaniola.

1865 – American inventor James Nason receives patent for the coffee percolator.

1908 – Boxer Jack Johnson, right, becomes the first African American to win the world heavyweight title, at Rushcutter’s Bay, on the outskirts of Sydney.

1956 – Twenty-one African Americans are arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, for riding in the ‘‘white’’ sections of buses during a mass defiance of laws requiring racial segregation on public transport.

1962 – Eight East Germans escape to West Berlin by crashing a bus through a border checkpoint.

1971 – Sixteen Vietnam War veterans seize the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour to dramatise their anti-war stand.

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

2003 – An earthquake at Bam, 980 kilometres southeast of the Iranian capital Tehran, kills 50,000 people and destroys 90 per cent of its residential area.

2004 – A massive tsunami triggered by earthquakes tears across the Indian Ocean, killing at least 216,000 people, and leaving more than a million homeless, in 12 Asian countries.

2007 – A ruptured fuel pipeline explodes, killing at least 34 people near Lagos, Nigeria.

Birthdays

Charles Babbage, UK mathematician and inventor of first computer (1791-1871); Mao Zedong, Chinese leader (1893-1976); Phil Spector, US music producer (1939-); Temuera Morrison, NZ actor (1963-); Lars Ulrich, US drummer with Metallica (1963-); Kit Harrington, UK Game of Thrones actor (1986-); Hugo Lloris, French footballer (1986-).