Today in history
1290 — Jews are exiled from England by proclamation of King Edward I.
1887 — US inventor Thomas A Edison receives a patent for his Kinetoscope, a device which produces moving pictures.
1920 — First ever news program is broadcast by the radio station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan.
1939 — Attempts by French Premier Daladier and British Prime Minister Chamberlain to negotiate with Adolf Hitler fail.
1950 — A contingent of 80 men from the First Battalion and the Royal Australian Regiment leaves for the Korean War.
1968 — West Indian Garfield Sobers becomes the first cricketer to score six sixes off one over in firstclass cricket, in England.
1969 — Rocky Marciano, former world heavyweight boxing champion, is killed in an air crash in Iowa.
1973 — Death of John Ford, US film director.
1990 — East and West Germany sign a treaty to harmonise their legal and political systems after merging on October 3.
2004 — The US Republican Party nominates President George W Bush for a second four-year term in the White House.
2005 — Nearly 1000 people — mostly women and children — either drown or are crushed to death in Baghdad when rumours of a suicide bomber spreads panic among millions of Shi’ite pilgrims crossing a bridge over the Tigris River.
2006 — Police in Norway recover the Edvard Munch masterpieces The Scream and Madonna, two years after masked gunmen grabbed the national art treasures in front of stunned visitors at an Oslo museum.
2008 — Practitioners of the ancient Greek religion gather among the ruined temples at the Acropolis, praying to Athena to stop the removal of sculptures and pieces of the temples to museums.
2013 — An Indian teenager is the first to be sentenced — to three years in a reform home — after a young woman was fatally raped on a moving New Delhi bus.
2015 — Unions royal commissioner Dyson Heydon rules he will not step aside over his speaking engagement at a Liberal fundraiser.
2016 — Former Health Services Union leader Kathy Jackson is charged with 70 counts of theft and deception for allegedly misusing about $900,000 of members’ money. TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS: Caligula (Gaius Caesar), Emperor of Rome (12-41); Maria Montessori, Italian doctor and educator (1870-1952); Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (1880-1962); Jordan’s Queen Rania Al-abdullah (1970-); Melanie Wright, Australian swimmer (1986-).