Today in History
1789 – Electors unanimously choose George Washington to be the first US president.
1924 – Mahatma Gandhi is freed after spending two years in jail in Bombay.
1927 – British driver Malcolm Campbell breaks the world land speed record in his car Bluebird, reaching 174.88mph (about 280kmh) at Pendine Sands, Wales.
1938 – Walt Disney releases Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. 1945 – Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt meet at Yalta to discuss postwar Europe.
1948 – Sri Lanka becomes a selfgoverning dominion in British Commonwealth.
1969 – Palestine Liberation Organisation is founded, with Yasser Arafat, left, as leader.
1971 – British carmaker Rolls-Royce declares itself bankrupt.
1974 – Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaps 19-year-old heiress Patty Hearst from her apartment in Berkeley, California.
1975 – American Lynne Cox becomes the first woman to swim Cook Strait, in 12 hours 7 minutes.
1976 – An earthquake measuring 7.5 magnitude kills 23,000 people near Guatemala City.
1983 – Karen Carpenter, left, dies of anorexia.
1985 – USS Buchanan is refused entry to NZ because the US will neither confirm nor deny that the vessel has nuclear capability.
1997 – Sixteen months after being cleared of murder charges, a civil trial jury blames OJ Simpson for the killings of his ex-wife and her friend.
1998 – A 6.1-magnitude quake and subsequent tremors in Afghanistan kill at least 4500 people.
2004 – Mark Zuckerberg launches ‘‘the Facebook’’ as a Harvard-based social network.
Birthdays Charles Lindbergh, US aviation pioneer (1902-74); Rosa Parks, US civil rights activist (1913-2005); Betty Friedan, US author (1921-85); Alice Cooper, US singer (1948-); Dame Jenny Shipley, NZ prime minister (1952-); Gerry Brownlee, NZ politician (1956-); Frank Bunce, All Black (1962-).