Today in history
Today is Monday, February 13, the 44th day of
2017. There are 321 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1542 — England’s Queen Catherine Howard is executed for treason on the orders of her husband, Henry VIII.
1601 — Sir James Lancaster VI leads the first East India Company voyage from London.
1633 — Italian astronomer Galileo arrives in Rome and is detained by the Roman Catholic
Inquisition.
1689 — The English Parliament adopts a bill of rights.
1820 — Duc de Berry, heir presumptive to the French throne, is assassinated by an antiroyalist.
1856 — Britain annexes Oudh, increasing Indian hostility to British rule.
1861 — Francis II of Naples, king of the two Sicilies, surrenders at Gaeta to
Giuseppe Garibaldi. 1869 — The Rev John Whiteley and seven other European settlers are murdered at White Cliffs, Taranaki.
1874 — The Mongol, the first direct steamship from Great Britain, arrives at Port Chalmers.
1931 — An aftershock measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale rocks the Hawkes Bay region in one of many tremors that have plagued the region since the destructive earthquake 10 days earlier.
1945 — United States warplanes firebomb Dresden, Germany, wiping out the city and killing more than 35,000 civilians.
1961 — The United Nations Security Council urges the use of force to prevent civil war in the Congo.
1968 — Tenthousand US troops are in the process of being transported to South Vietnam on a spedup basis as fighting increases in that country.
1975 —The New Zealand Post Office admits there are no detector vans travelling the country to catch people who have not paid their broadcasting licence.
1976 — Nigerian junta leader General Murtala Ramat Muhammed is assassinated in a coup attempt.
1980 — New Zealand beats West Indies by one wicket in a dramatic cricket test match at Carisbrook.
1981 — Some 800 pigs and a pet sheep are slaughtered and burned on a farm near Temuka in a suspected outbreak of footandmouth. It is later discovered that some of the pigs had developed blisters on their snouts due to diet and not as a result of footandmouth.
1989 — The Soviet Red Army leaves the Afghan capital of Kabul.
1990 — Roaring crowds give Nelson Mandela a hero’s welcome when he returns to the township of Soweto after his release from prison.
1991 — US planes destroy a bunker in Baghdad that allies identified as a military site, but apparently contained civilians, with the reported death toll ranging from 40 to 500.
1992 — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat claims a tape in which he purportedly made slanderous comments about Jews was doctored.
1993 — Angolan government troops break into the Unita rebelheld highlands in an attempt to open a supply corridor to the embattled city of Huambo.
1995 — Peru announces it has captured the last Ecuadoran stronghold in Peruvian territory and declares a unilateral ceasefire in the Andean border war.
1996 — Israeli troops seal off the West Bank and Gaza to prevent terrorist attacks.
2002 — The Scottish Parliament votes to ban fox hunting, making Scotland the first part of Britain to ban the centuriesold sport.
2008 — Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd makes a formal apology to the Aboriginal people and the stolen generation.
2012 — A sleeping teenager is rescued by a friend who scaled the wall to the second floor of Dunedin’s Kingsgate Hotel, in Smith St, when fire breaks out in a vacant room on the floor above him.