Today in History
1773 – King of Tonga presents Captain James Cook, right, with a giant turtle, which dies in London in
1966.
1883 – New York’s Metropolitan Opera House opens with a production of Gounod’s opera Faust.
1909 – French aviator Elise de Laroche, better known by the title Baronne de Laroche, makes her first solo flight, a distance of 300 metres. In March 1910, she became the first qualified female pilot.
1910 – British murderer Dr Hawley Crippen is sentenced to death at the Old Bailey in London.
1962 – South African black leader Nelson Mandela pleads not guilty at the start of his treason trial.
1964 – French writer Jean- Paul Sartre rejects the Nobel Prize for Literature, saying it would reduce the impact of his writing.
1992 – A UN-sponsored commission says it has discovered signs of a mass grave near the Croatian city of Vukovar.
1995 – British novelist and poet Sir Kingsley Amis dies.
2003 – USA Today publishes a leaked memorandum dated October 16 from US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld to four high-level Defence Department associates in which he questioned the progress in the war on terrorism.
2010 – WikiLeaks website is poised to release what the US Defence Department fears is the largest cache of secret US documents in history.
2014 – Researchers say breathing polluted air in the first two years of life is linked to autism.
Birthdays
Franz Liszt, Hungarian-born composer (1811-1886); Sarah Bernhardt, French actress
(1844-1923); Ivan Bunin, Russian writer, Nobel laureate (1870-1953); Catherine Deneuve, French actress
(1943-); Jeff Goldblum, US actor
(1952-); Shaggy, Jamaican reggae rapper (1968-); Zac Hanson, pop musician (1985-).