Today in History
1536 – Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry VIII, and her brother are tried and found guilty of adultery and incest.
1800 – US President John Adams orders the federal government to leave Philadelphia for the new capital in Washington DC.
1863 – The Salon des Refuse´s opens in Paris, exhibiting paintings rejected by the official Paris Salon. It included Edouard Manet’s Le De´ jeuner sur l’herbe, right.
1901 – Nicholas Oates, owner of one of only seven motor vehicles in Canterbury, is fined £1 for exceeding 4mph, and frightening horses, in Lincoln Rd, Christchurch.
1916 – Sykes-Picot deal between Britain and France carves up Arab regions of former Ottoman empire.
1920 – Charles Mackay, mayor of Whanganui, shoots poet Richard D’Arcy Cresswell in his office, after a homosexual advance.
1928 – The Royal Flying Doctor Service is inaugurated in Cloncurry, Queensland.
1940 – The first McDonald’s restaurant opens, in San Bernardino, California.
1948 – The state of Israel, one day old, is attacked by Egyptian planes and invaded by troops from Lebanon and Transjordan.
1957 – Britain explodes its first hydrogen bomb, in the South Pacific.
1970 – Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, two black students at Jackson State University in Mississippi, are killed when police open fire during student protests.
1972 – Alabama governor George Wallace, a Democratic presidential candidate, is shot at a rally in Maryland, and left paralysed from the waist down.
1988 – USSR begins withdrawing 115,000 troops from Afghanistan.
1993 - An overwhelming majority of Bosnian Serbs vote against a peace accord which would have forced them to surrender some of the 70 per cent of Bosnia they control. 1998 – India declares itself a nuclear nation after five bomb tests the same week. 2008 – Myanmar government says its military-backed constitution has been overwhelmingly approved by voters – a claim criticised as the vote was held days after a cyclone that killed tens of thousands of people.
2010 – Jessica Watson, at 16, becomes youngest person to sail solo, non-stop and unassisted around the world.
2019 – Five big tech companies pledge to tackle extremist material at The Christchurch Call initiative in Paris, hosted by Jacinda Ardern and Emmanuel Macron.
Birthdays
Pierre Curie, French scientist (1859-1906); James Mason, UK-born actor (1909-84); Anne Anituatua Delamere, founder member of Ma¯ori Women’s Welfare League (1921-2006); Barry Crump, NZ writer (1935-96); Trini Lopez, US singer (1937-2020); Madeleine Albright, US politician (1937-); Brian Eno, UK musician (1948-); Andy Murray, UK tennis player (1987-).