Today in history
1272 - King Henry III of England, who had ruled since 1216, dies and is succeeded by his son Edward I.
1797 - British navy withdraws from Mediterranean.
1840 - New Zealand officially becomes a separate colony of Britain; the North, South and Stewart Islands are to be known respectively as the provinces of New Ulster, New Munster and New Leinster.
1869 - Maori rebel Hamiora Pere is hanged in Wellington, becoming the first and only New Zealander executed for treason.
1941 - Nazi Germany launches second assault, also failed, on Moscow in World War II.
1959 - Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music
premieres in New York.
1968 - Soviet Union announces it has launched world’s largest space ship to date, the Proton Four.
1970 - Pakistani officials say death toll in typhoon and tidal wave that struck Bay of Bengal may reach 500,000.
1988 - Voters in Pakistan cast ballots in their first open election in more than a decade, resulting in victory for populist candidate Benazir Bhutto.
1989 - South African President FW de Klerk announces the scrapping of the Separate Amenities Act, opening up the country’s beaches to all races.
2000 - The only known oil painting of Winnie the Pooh done by illustrator Ernest Howard Shepard is sold at auction to a Winnipeg museum for $C243,000.
2001 - Investigators find a letter addressed to Senator Patrick Leahy containing anthrax. It is the second letter bearing the deadly germ known to have been sent to Capitol Hill.
2002 - The military ruler of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, is sworn in for a new five-year term.
2006 - Milton Friedman, one of the most influential economists of the past century and a champion of free markets, died at the age of 94. He won the 1976 Nobel Prize for economics.
2006 - The Tongan capital of Nuku’alofa is in ruins after prodemocracy rioters attack buildings and businesses linked to the royal family and Chinese immigrants.
2007 - A Sydney coroner declares that five Australia-based journalists, including Kiwi Gary Cunningham – the ‘‘Balibo Five’’ – were murdered by Indonesian soldiers during the 1975 invasion of East Timor, to prevent them from exposing the role of the Indonesian military in the take-over. Today’s birthdays:
Roman Emperor Tiberius (42BC37AD); Burgess Meredith, US actor (1910-1998); Griff Rhys Jones, Welsh comedian (1953-); Frank Bruno, British heavyweight boxer (1961-); Zina Garrison-jackson, US tennis player (1963-).