Today in History

1494 - Christopher Columbus sights the island of Jamaica, which he names Santiago.

1814 - King Louis XVIII returns to Paris after defeat of Napoleon.

1897 - Margaret Cruickshank becomes New Zealand’s first registered female doctor.

1926 - Britain’s Trade Union Congress calls for the country’s first general strike, in support of coal miners. It lasts for nine days.

1929 - Charles Ewing Mackay, former mayor of Whanganui, who shot a man in his office after a homosexual advance, dies in a riot in Berlin.

1937 - Margaret Mitchell wins a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Gone with the Wind.

1945 - Indian forces capture Rangoon, Burma, from Japanese.

1948 - US Supreme Court rules covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to African Americans and other minorities are not legally enforceable.

1979 - Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher becomes Britain’s first female prime minister.

1988 - White House acknowledges that first lady Nancy Reagan used astrological advice to help schedule her husband’s activities.

2004 - The US military reprimands seven officers for abuse of inmates at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.

2007 - British three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappears while on holiday with her family in Portugal.

2011 - A tornado kills one person and injures more than 20 after ripping through a shopping centre north of Auckland.

2018 - US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members vote to expel Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski.

Birthdays

Nicolo Machiavelli, Italian philosopher (1469-1527); Golda Meir, Israeli politician (1898-1978); Bing Crosby, US singer/actor (1903-77); James Brown, US musician (1933-2006); Honey Hireme-Smiler, NZ league/union player (1981-).