NOW & THEN
12 OCTOBER
1216: King John of England lost his crown jewels in The Wash, probably near Fosdyke.
1492: Christopher Columbus sighted his first land in discovering the New World, calling it San Salvador. He was convinced that the island was part of Japan.
1549: John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, became English premier.
1609: Three Blind Mice was published in London, believed to be the earliest printed secular song.
1822: Brazil became independent of Portugal.
1823: Charles Macintosh of Scotland began selling raincoats.
1879: British troops occupied Kabul, Afghanistan.
1899: Mafeking was besieged by the Boers for 217 days.
1901: President Theodore Roosevelt renamed the Washington executive mansion the White House.
1915: British nurse Edith Cavell was shot by a German firing squad in Brussels for helping hundreds of Allied servicemen escape from occupied Belgium.
1915: The Ford Motor Company manufactured its 1 millionth Model T automobile.
1917: The first Battle of Passchendaele was fought during the First World War.
1928: An “iron lung” was used for the first time on a patient, in Boston, Massachusetts.
1934: Peter II became King of Yugoslavia after the assassination of his father, King Alexander.
1942: US forces defeated Japanese in Battle of Cape Esperance on Guadalcanal.
1945: Allied Control Council in Germany ordered dissolution of Nazi Party.
1948: Any Questions began on BBC radio.
1964: Army forces took control in South Vietnam, ousting government of Major Gen Nguyen Khanh in bloodless coup.
1984: Five people were killed by an IRA bomb in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, during the Conservative Party conference.
1987: Costa Rica president Oscar Arias won the Nobel peace prize in acknowledgement of his work for peace in central America.
1990: Speaker of Egypt’s parliament and four security men were assassinated.
1992: The World Fair closed in Seville, Spain. It had 15 million visitors.
1997: Sidi Daoud massacre in Algeria; 43 killed at a fake roadblock.
1999: Pervez Musharraf took power in Pakistan from Nawaz Sharif through a bloodless coup.
1999: The former Soviet Republic of Abkhazia declared its independence from Georgia.
1999: The proclaimed six-billionth living human in the world was born.
2000: The USS Cole was badly damaged in Aden, Yemen, by two suicide bombers. Seventeen crew died and at least 39 were injured.
2002: More than 200 people died and 300 were injured when al-qaeda terrorists bombed a nightclub in Bali.
2010: An RSPCA survey revealed that 95 per cent of people said they would refuse to wear real fur.