Today in history
1676 - Theodore III becomes tsar of Russia on death of his father Alexis.
1819 - Sir Stamford Raffles lands on Singapore and concludes a treaty with a local ruler to set up a British trading post.
1840 - First governor of New Zealand and co-author of the Treaty of Waitangi Captain William Hobson arrives in the Bay of Islands.
1842 - Auckland hosts its first Anniversary Day regatta, although the races don’t become an annual fixture until 1850.
1845 - Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven is first published in the New York Evening Mirror.
1900 - The American League, consisting of eight baseball teams, is organised in Philadelphia.
1916 - Germans stage first Zeppelin raid on Paris in World War I.
1943 - The New Zealand cruiser Kiwi collides with with Japanese submarine I-1 at Guadalcanal.
1947 - United States abandons its mediation role in China.
1949 - Britain grants de facto recognition to new state of Israel.
1963 - Britain is refused entry into European Common Market by French veto.
1992 - Russian President Boris Yeltsin unveils a nuclear weapons reduction plan.
1993 - French Marines enter Zaire’s capital. Dozens of civilians, soldiers and foreigners die in the bloodshed.
1994 - Ulrike Maier, a 10-year downhill veteran with two world titles, dies after breaking her neck in a freak crash during a World Cup race.
1996 - La Fenice, the 204-year-old opera house, burns down in Venice, Italy.
2000 - In Egypt, a 32-year-old housewife is the first woman to file for divorce under a new law that doesn’t require women to prove physical or psychological harm.
2004 - The celebrated New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, dies in Dunedin aged 79.
2008 - Gunmen hold more than 30 people hostage inside a Venezuelan bank for more than a day. They flee the next day in an ambulance, but eventually surrender and free their last five captives.
2012 - Europe’s crippling debt crisis dominates the world’s foremost gathering of business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland, but for the first time the growing inequality between the planet’s haves and havenots becomes an issue, thanks largely to the Arab Spring uprisings, the antiwall Street Occupy movement in the United States and other protests around the globe.
Today’s Birthdays:
Emanuel Swedenborg, Swedish philosopher (1688-1772); Thomas Paine, American patriot-author (1737-1809); Daniel Huber, French composer (1782-1871); Tom Selleck, US actor (1945- ); Oprah Winfrey, US television personality (1954- ).