NOW & THEN
DECEMBER 28
1612: Galileo recorded the first observation of Neptune, but thought it was a star rather than a planet.
1065: Westminster Abbey was dedicated.
1598: The oldest minute of any masonic lodge was recorded.
1826: Thirty thousand people were killed when a 6.8 earthquake struck Japan.
1850: Rangoon, Burma was destroyed by fire.
1879: Sir Thomas Bouch’s new railway bridge across the River Tay collapsed in a storm, throwing an engine, six coaches and 75 passengers into the water 160ft below. Faults in the design and construction of the bridge were blamed.
1906: Twenty-two died in railway disaster at Elliott Junction, near Arbroath. Heavy snow had brought down telegraph lines and also made a signal droop so that it appeared “clear”. In the confusion, with single-line working in operation because of a derailed goods train, a southbound express travelling tenderfirst ran into a stationary local train.
1908: An earthquake killed more than 75,000 people at Messina in Sicily.
1915: Conscription was introduced in Britain during the First World War, single men being conscripted before married men.
1918: Lloyd George’s government was re-elected, and women voted for the first time.
1942: Japanese planes bombed Calcutta, India, in Second World War.
1950: The Peak District was designated the first National Park in Britain.
1962: Fighting broke out in Congo between Katangan and United Nations forces who eventually occupied capital of Elisabethville.
1963: The last That Was The Week That Was (known as TW3), television’s first satirical show, was broadcast by the BBC.
1963: Scottish Formula One driver Jim Clark won the first of his two World Drivers Championships.
1968: Israeli commandos raided Beirut Airport, destroying 13 Arab aircraft.
1972: Four Arab guerrillas held six hostages in Israeli embassy in Bangkok for 19 hours, then freed their prisoners and flew to Cairo.
1973: Alexander Solzhenitsyn published “Gulag Archipelago” – a literary investigation of the
police-state system in the Soviet Union.
1974: Leftist guerrillas in Managua, Nicaragua, invaded Christmas party for United States ambassador, killed three guards and took several prominent Nicaraguans hostage.
1975: All 372 men died, despite intensive rescue efforts, when trapped by a coal mine explosion in northeastern India.
1998: Three Britons and an American taken hostage in Yemen were killed when security forces stormed their kidnappers’ hideout.
2007: King Gyanendra of Nepal was stripped of his powers as parliament ended 239 years of rule by the “god king” and the country became a democratic federal republic.
2009: Forty-three people died in a suicide bombing in Karachi, Pakistan.