ON THIS DAY DECEMBER 3

1521 Pope Leo X excommunicates Martin Luther in the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem.

1777 American General George Washington defeats British General Lord Cornwallis at the Battle of Princeton.

1833 The UK claims sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.

1892 Writer JRR Tolkien born in Bloemfontein.

1911 A gun battle in London’s East End leaves two dead and sparks a political row over the involvement of then-Home Secretary Winston Churchill.

1924 British Egyptologist Howard Carter finds the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor after several years of searching.

1925 Benito Mussolini announces he is taking dictatorial powers over Italy.

1946 An Englishman known during World War II as “Lord Haw Haw” (William Joyce) was hanged for treason in London. Joyce had broadcast Nazi propaganda via radio from Germany to Britain during the war.

1956 Fire damages the top of the Eiffel Tower.

1957 The Hamilton Watch Company introduces the first electric watch.

1959 Alaska admitted as the 49th US state, with a land mass almost one-fifth the size of the lower 48 states together.

1961 A protest by agricultural workers in Baixa de Cassanje, Portuguese Angola, turns into a revolt, opening the Angolan War of Independence, the first of the Portuguese colonial wars.

1962 Pope John XXIII excommunicates Fidel Castro.

1969 Birth of Michael Schumacher, German champion racing driver.

1977 Apple Computer is incorporated. 1980 Author of the book Born Free, Joy Adamson, is murdered in Kenya.

1987 Rev Allan Hendrikse and 150 supporters swim at a Whites Only beach in Port Elizabeth.

1990 US invasion of Panama: Manuel Noriega, its former leader, surrenders.

1994 More than 7 million people from the former apartheid Homelands receive South African citizenship.

2009 The first block of the blockchain of the decentralised payment system Bitcoin, called the Genesis block, was established by the creator of the system, Satoshi Nakamoto.

2015 Boko Haram militants raze the entire town of Baga in north-east Nigeria, killing as many as 2 000 people. | THE HISTORIAN