Today in History

79 – Death of Roman emperor Vespasian.

1509 – Henry VIII crowned king of England.

1793 – France adopts its first republican constitution.

1812 – Napoleon invades Russia, with an army of 500,000 soldiers.

1852 – Floods wash away Gundagai township, NSW, killing 89.

1901 –At19, Pablo Picasso, right, opens his first exhibition, in Paris. 1905 – The first edition of New Zealand Truth is published. The weekly paper lasts until 2013.

1947 – An American pilot reports seeing strange objects in the sky looking like ‘‘saucers skipping across the water’’, leading to the first use of the term ‘‘flying saucer’’.

1948 – Soviet Union begins Berlin blockade.

1953 – Senator John Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier announce their engagement.

1973 – Eamon de Valera resigns as president of Ireland at age of 90. 1989 – Zhao Ziyang is deposed as Chinese Communist Party general secretary by Jiang Zemin.

2010 – Julia Gillard becomes Australia’s first female PM; in the longest tennis match in history, American John Isner defeats Nicolas Mahut of France at Wimbledon after 11 hours, 5 minutes of play over three days. 2014 – Former News of the World editor Andy Coulson is convicted of conspiracy to hack phones in the UK scandal that led to the newspaper’s shutdown.

Birthdays

Horatio Kitchener, UK soldier (1850-1916); James Chapman-Taylor, UK/NZ architect, furniture maker (1878-1958); Jack Dempsey, US boxer (1895-1983); Sir Graham Liggins, NZ medical scientist (1926-2010); Ken Gray, All Black prop (1938-1992); Mick Fleetwood, UK musician (1947-); David Seymour, NZ politician (1983-); Solange Knowles, US singer/ songwriter (1986-); Stuart Broad, UK cricketer (1986-); Lionel Messi, Argentine footballer (1987-).