Today in History

1642 – Death of Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, under house arrest, aged 77.

1654 – Ukraine joins Russia. 1679 – French explorer Robert de la Salle reaches Niagara Falls. 1863 – Geologist Julius von Haast, right, begins an expedition in search of an overland route from the east to the west coast of the South Island. The route he takes is now known as Haast Pass.

1916 – Allied forces begin full retreat from the shores of the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey.

1996 – A cargo plane crashes into a crowded market in Kinshasa, Zaire (Congo), killing 255 people by the official count. The unofficial death toll reaches 1000.

1998 – Ramzi Yousef, a Kuwaitborn Pakistani, is sentenced to life in prison plus 240 years for masterminding the World Trade Center bombing in New York that killed six people in 1993.

2009 – Leonidas Vargas, a convicted Colombian drug baron with links to smuggling cartels, is shot dead in a Madrid hospital.

2011 – Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is critically injured in a shooting spree that leaves six people dead during a constituents’ meeting in Tucson.

2012 – Iran is reported to have begun uranium enrichment at a new underground site built to withstand possible airstrikes, in another show of defiance against Western pressure to rein in its nuclear programme.

Birthdays

Elvis Presley, US singer (1935-77); Shirley Bassey, UK singer (1937-); Graham Chapman, UK actor/writer, of Monty Python (1941-89); Stephen Hawking, UK physicist (1942-2018); David Bowie, English singer-actor

(1947-2016); Garry Moore, ex-mayor of Christchurch (1951-); Paul McDonald, NZ canoeist (1960-); Kim Jong Un, North Korean leader

(1983-); David Silva, Spanish footballer (1986-); Aaron Cruden, All Black (1989-); Sophie Pascoe, NZ swimmer (1993-).