Today in History

1460 – James II of Scotland is killed during siege of Roxburgh Castle.

1492 – Christopher Columbus embarks from Spain, aboard the Santa Maria, on his first voyage of westward exploration.

1872 – Anthony Trollope one of the Victorian era’s most famous novelists, lands at Bluff to begin a two-month tour of New Zealand.

1900 – Firestone Tire and Rubber Company is founded. 1904 – British troops enter Lhasa, Tibet, as the Dalai Lama flees.

1914 – Germany invades neutral Belgium, rejecting ultimatum to withdraw from Britain, and declares war on France, beginning World War I. 1936 – US sprinter Jesse Owens, right, wins the 100 metres in front of Adolf Hitler at the Berlin Olympics.

1940 – Lithuania is formally incorporated into the Soviet Union.

1941 – A Finnish sailing ship, Pamir, is seized in Wellington Harbour by the government as a war prize.

1958 – The nuclear-powered US submarine Nautilus makes the first undersea crossing of the North Pole.

1975 – A chartered Boeing jetliner 707 crashes in southern Morocco, killing 188 people.

2004 – The base of the Statue of Liberty reopens to visitors for the first time since the 9/11 attacks; Henri Cartier-Bresson, a master of street photography, dies aged 95.

2008 – Death of Russian writer and Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, aged 89.

2014 – An earthquake in China’s Yunnan province kills at least 367 people and injures more than 1800.

Birthdays

Tony Bennett, US singer (1926-); Terry Wogan, Irish broadcaster (1938-2016); Martin Sheen, US actor (1940-); Martha Stewart, US entrepreneur (1941-); James Hetfield, US musician (Metallica) (1963-); Frano Botica, NZ rugby and league player (1963-); Tom Brady, American football quarterback (1977-); Evangeline Lilly, Canadian actress (1979-); Ryan Lochte, US swimmer (1984-); Sonny Bill Williams, NZ rugby and league player (1985-).