ON THIS DAY

NATIONAL DAY OF UGANDA

1701: Yale College in the United States received its charter.

1804: Hobart, Tasmania, was founded.

1888: The 555ft white marble Washington Monument, designed by Robert Mills, was opened.

1905: Sarah Bernhardt had the accident which was to blight her career. Playing Floria in Tosca, she had to jump from a parapet. Stagehands forgot the mattresses for her to land on, and she fell heavily on her right knee. Her leg was later amputated.

1940: Beatle John Lennon was born during an air raid in Liverpool.

1962: Uganda became independent.

1967: Revolutionary leader Che Guevara was captured in Bolivia and shot.

1974: German businessman Oskar Schindler, credited with saving 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust, died at the age of 66.

1990: Hundreds of Chinese people queued to buy Big Macs when McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Shenzhen.

2009: US president Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize ‘for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’.

A humpback whale which swam into the Thames was hit by a ship, the Zoological Society of London said.

ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR:

BIRTHDAYS: The Duke of Kent, 85; Brian Blessed, actor, 84; John Pilger, investigative journalist and filmmaker, 81; Steve Ovett, former athlete, 65; David Cameron, former prime minister/leader of the Conservative Party, 54; PJ Harvey, rock singer,

51; Sean Lennon, singer, 45; Mark Viduka, former footballer, 45; Nicky Byrne, pop star (Westlife), 42; Chris O’Dowd, actor, 41.