Today in History

1683 – Plot to assassinate King Charles II of Britain and his brother James, Duke of York, is uncovered.

1798 – French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte capture the island of Malta.

1889 – Eighty-nine people are killed in the Armagh rail disaster, in Ireland.

1923 – Harry Houdini frees himself from a straitjacket while suspended upside down in New York.

1897 – Swiss cutlery maker Carl Elsener patents his penknife, later to become known as the Swiss army knife.

1942 – The first United States troops arrive in New Zealand, which becomes a base for the Allies’ counter-offensive against Japan.

1963 – Black civil rights leader Medgar Evers is shot to death outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. De La Beckwith was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in 2001; Bigbudget flop Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor, premieres in New York.

1964 – Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and other anti-apartheid leaders are sentenced to life in prison in South Africa.

1973 – Needing an unlikely 479 to win against England at Trent Bridge, the New Zealand cricket team are all out for 440. 1987 – US President Ronald Reagan challenges Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.

1991 – Boris Yeltsin is elected president of the Russian Republic.

1994 – Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman are found stabbed to death in Brentwood, California; her ex-husband, former American football star OJ Simpson, is later acquitted of their murders.

2003 – Gregory Peck, one of the last great stars from Hollywood’s golden era, dies aged 87. 2007 – The UN war crimes tribunal sentences Milan Martic, a former Croatian Serb leader, to 35 years in prison for atrocities committed during the Bosnia war in the early 1990s. Martic was convicted on 16 counts including murder, torture, deportation and other crimes against humanity.

2012 – An Australian coroner’s report rules that a dingo was responsible for the death of baby Azaria Chamberlain in 1980.

2016 – A gunman kills 49 people in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and injures dozens more.

2018 – US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un meet for a summit in Singapore.

Birthdays

Anthony Eden, UK politician (1897- 1977); George Herbert Walker Bush, US president (1924-2018); Anne Frank, German-born diarist (1929-1945); Javed Miandad, Pakistani cricketer and coach (1957-); Rod Latham, NZ cricketer (1961-); Jordan Peterson, Canadian psychologist (1962-); Lorraine Downes, former NZ beauty queen (1964-); Bryan Habana, South African rugby player (1983-).