Today in History
211 – Roman Emperor Septimius Severus dies in Eboracum (York) in England, leaving the Roman Empire in the hands of his two quarrelsome sons, Caracalla and Geta.
1789 – Electoral college delegates unanimously choose George Washington to be the first United States president, and John Adams as vicepresident.
1922 – First part of New Zealander Katherine Mansfield’s short story The Garden Party runs in the Saturday Westminster Gazette.
1927 – British driver Malcolm Campbell breaks the world land speed record in his car Bluebird, reaching 174.88mph (280kph) at Pendine Sands, Wales. 1945 – Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin begin their conference in Yalta to discuss postwar Europe.
1948 – Sri Lanka becomes an independent, self-governing dominion within the Commonwealth.
1950 – IV British Empire Games open in Auckland.
1957 – First electric portable typewriter goes on sale, in Syracuse, New York.
1971 – British carmaker Rolls-Royce declares itself bankrupt.
1974 – Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaps 19-year-old heiress Patty Hearst from her California apartment.
1975 – American Lynne Cox becomes the first woman to swim Cook Strait, in 12 hours 7 minutes.
1976 – A 7.5-magnitude earthquake kills 23,000 people near Guatemala City.
1983 – Singer Karen Carpenter dies of heart failure brought on by anorexia.
1985 – The American warship Buchanan is refused entry to NZ because the US will neither confirm nor deny that it has nuclear capability.
1990 – New Zealander Richard Hadlee takes his 400th test cricket wicket (Sanjay Manjrekar).
1991 – NZ cricketers Martin Crowe and Andrew Jones make a world-record 467-run stand, against Sri Lanka at the Basin Reserve in Wellington.
1997 – Sixteen months after he was cleared of murder charges, OJ Simpson is found responsible by a civil jury for the killings of his ex-wife and her friend.
2003 – Lawmakers formally dissolve Yugoslavia and replace it with a loose union of Serbia and Montenegro.
2004 – Student Mark Zuckerberg launches ‘‘the Facebook’’ as a Harvardbased social network.
2013 – France annuls 213-year-old law banning women in Paris from wearing trousers.
Birthdays
Charles Lindbergh, US aviator (1902-74); Rosa Parks, US civil rights activist (1913-2005); Betty Friedan, US author (1921-2006); Isabel Pero´n, Argentinian politician (1931-); Alice Cooper, US musician (1948-); Dame Jenny Shipley, NZ politician (1952-); Gerry Brownlee, NZ politician (1956-); Frank Bunce, All Black (1962-).