Today in history
Today is Saturday, March 11, the 70th day of 2017. There are 295 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1702 — The world’s first successful daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, is published in London.
1810 — Emperor Napoleon of France is married by proxy to Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria.
1812 — King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia declares Jews citizens with equal rights.
1818 — Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is published.
1820 — Death of Sir Alexander MacKenzie, the Scottish explorer who established a trade route from the frozen Northwest Territories to the Pacific Ocean on the west coast of North America in 1793.
1845 — The flagstaff at Russell is cut down for a fourth and final time when warriors led by Kawiti and Hone Heke invade the town. The flagstaff was not reerected until 1858.
1891 — A public meeting in Christchurch organised by Arthur Harper and George Mannering decides to form the New Zealand Alpine Club.
1899 — A railway collision at Rakaia kills four passengers and injures 22 others. Following the accident all trains in New Zealand were fitted with the Westinghouse continuous automatic airbraking system.
1903 — The Otago Witness reports on the first locallymade motor vehicle. Made by Mr G. Methven, the vehicle seated two people, had a 4hp petrol engine, and could travel at 12mph.
1920 — Emir Faisal becomes king of the Arab Kingdom of Syria (Greater Syria).
1935 — Hermann Goering officially creates the German air force, the Luftwaffe.
1938 — German forces enter Austria.
1955 — Death of Sir Alexander Fleming, Scottish bacteriologist and Nobel prize winner who (with the help of Australia’s Howard Florey) discovered penicillin in 1928.
1960 — The US launches Pioneer V into orbit around the sun from Cape Canaveral.
1970 — Death of Erle Stanley Gardner, US author and lawyer who wrote nearly 100 detective and mystery novels and created the character Perry Mason.
1985 — Mikhail Gorbachev is chosen to succeed the late Soviet President Konstantin Chernenko; Egypt’s AlFayed brothers win control of the House of Fraser in London and thus gain control of the department store Harrods.
2000 — A methane gas explosion rips through a coal mine in eastern Ukraine, killing 81 workers.
2002 — A fire and stampede at a girls’ school in Saudi Arabia kills 15 girls, sparking an outcry as newspapers accuse the country’s religious police of preventing male firefighters and paramedics from rescuing the girls because the girls were not wearing the abaya, a black headtotoe covering required by Saudi law.
2003 — Libya reaches political agreement with the US and Britain to accept civil responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and pay $US10 million each to victims’ families.
2009 — Michael Swann, who defrauded the Otago District Health Board of almost $17 million, is sentenced to nine years, six months’ jail with a minimum nonparole period of four years, six months. His partner in the crime, Kerry Harford, receives a sentence of four years, three months.
2016 — Following a massive public funding campaign, the sale of Awaroa Inlet Beach in the Abel Tasman National Park is confirmed. The area will be officially gifted into the Abel Tasman National Park on July 10.