ON THIS DAY
1888: The 555ft white marble Washington Monument, designed by Robert Mills, was opened.
1905: Sarah Bernhardt had the accident which was to blight her career. Playing Floria in Tosca, she had to jump from a parapet. Stagehands forgot the mattresses for her to land on, and she fell heavily on her right knee. Her leg was later amputated.
1940: Beatle John Lennon was born during an air raid in Liverpool. 1962: Uganda became independent. 1967: Revolutionary leader Che Guevara was captured in Bolivia and shot.
1974: German businessman Oskar Schindler, credited with saving 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust, died at the age of 66. 1990: Hundreds of Chinese people queued to buy Big Macs when McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Shenzhen. 2009: US president Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: Sir Paul McCartney marked what would have been the 80th birthday of his late Beatles bandmate John Lennon, by sharing a black and white photograph of the pair together.