Today in History

1510 – Portuguese admiral Afonso de Albuquerque formally occupies Goa, in India.

1801 – Thomas Jefferson is elected third president of the United States.

1873 – The Daily Southern Cross publishes a hoax report that Russians on the warship Kaskowiski had landed in Auckland and taken the mayor hostage. The report spread alarm, despite an asterisk on the headline referring to April 1, and the resemblence of the ship’s name to ‘‘cask of whisky’’.

1876 – Sardines are first canned by Julius Wolff in Eastport, Maine.

1880 – Tsar Alexander II of Russia survives an assassination attempt.

1904 – The opera Madama

Butterfly, by Giacomo Puccini, premieres in Milan.

1933 – The first issue of American news magazine Newsweek is published.

1936 – The world’s first superhero,

The Phantom, left, a cartoon strip by Lee Falk, makes his first appearance in comics.

1949 – Chaim Weitzman is elected the first president of Israel.

1972 – The British Parliament votes to join the European Common Market; the Volkswagen Beetle surpasses the Ford Model T as the world’s best-selling car.

1976 – Richard Hadlee takes 7-23 in a match-winning spell of bowling for New Zealand in their cricket test against India.

1979 – China invades Vietnam, marking the start of the SinoVietnamese War.

1996 – World chess champion Garry Kasparov defeats the IBM computer Deep Blue. It defeats him in a rematch the following year.

Birthdays

Michael Jordan, US basketball player (1963-); Billie Joe Armstrong, US musician, Green Day (1972-); Louisa Wall, NZ politician (1972-); Paris Hilton, US TV personality (1981-); AB de Villiers, South African cricketer (1984-); Ed Sheeran, UK musician (1991-); Jordie Barrett, All Black (1997-).