Today in History

641 AD – Chinese Princess Wen Cheng goes to Tibet to marry the Tibetan ruler and the marriage becomes the basis for China’s claim to sovereignty over the region. 1642 – Abel Tasman is the first European to sight NZ, viewing the northwest coast of the South Island.

1868 – Henry O’Farrell fires a gun at Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s second son, at a picnic at Sydney’s Clontarf Beach. He survives. 1894 – Coca-Cola is sold in bottles for the first time.

1930 – Mahatma Gandhi opens civil disobedience campaign in India against British.

1938 – Nazi Germany invades Austria.

1945 – Anne Frank, left, the Dutch Jewish teenager who kept a diary of her wartime experiences, dies in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, aged 15.

1988 – South African government bans church-led opposition group headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as ‘‘threat to public safety’’. 1993 – At least 200 people are killed and 1100 injured in a series of bomb explosions in Bombay, India. 2000 – Pope John Paul II asks forgiveness for past sins of his Church, including its treatment of Jews, heretics and women.

2001 – A US Navy jet mistakenly drops a bomb on a group of military personnel at a bombing range in Kuwait, killing five Americans and one New Zealander. 2003 – Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic dies after being struck by two bullets in Belgrade. 2011 – First reactor at Fukushima nuclear power plant melts and explodes, a day after a large earthquake and tsunami in Japan. 2013 – Curiosity rover answers a key question about Mars: the red planet long ago harboured some of the ingredients needed for primitive life to thrive.

Birthdays:

Jack Kerouac, US writer (1922-1969); Edward Albee, US playwright (1928-2016); Liza Minnelli, US singer-actress (1946-); Mitt Romney, US politician (1947-); James Taylor, US singer (1948-).