Highlights in history on this date:
1574 – Murad III succeeds as Sultan of Turkey on death of Selim II.
1677 – Brandenburg’s Frederick William I takes Stettin, Poland; Denmark’s King Christian V is defeated by Swedish force at Cassel, Germany.
1792 – Ludwig van Beethoven, aged 22 and newly arrived in Vienna, notes in his diary he has 15 ducats: enough for his first music lesson with Franz Joseph Haydn.
1859 – First Queensland government ministry is appointed.
1889 – Death of Robert Browning, English poet.
1894 – Japanese troops invade Korea.
1896 – Guglielmo Marconi gives the first public demonstration of wireless in London.
1913 – Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting Mona Lisa is recovered in Florence, two years after its theft from the Louvre in Paris.
1915 – First all-metal plane, known as the Tin Donkey, flies for the first time.
1920 – Martial law is declared in Cork, Ireland.
1925 – “World’s first motel”, the Motel Inn, opens in San Luis Obispo, California.
1936 – Chinese Nationalist troops at Xi’an arrest their commander, Chiang Kai-shek, forcing him to fight invading Japanese instead of communists.
1939 – Death of Douglas Fairbanks senior, swashbuckling US actor.
1946 – A UN Committee votes to accept a six-block tract of Manhattan real estate offered as a gift by John D Rockefeller Jr to be the site of the UN headquarters.
1955 – First prototype of the hovercraft is patented by British engineer Christopher Cockerell.
1968 – Death of Tallulah Bankhead, US actress.
1989 – British begin forced repatriation of Vietnamese refugees from camps in Hong Kong.
1991 – Boris Yeltsin wins landslide approval in Russian legislature for his new Commonwealth of Independent States.
1992 – A strong earthquake kills 2500 people on Flores Island, eastern Indonesia.
1995 – ABC television and radio journalist Andrew Olle dies in Sydney aged 47, from a brain tumour.
1997 – Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the international terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, goes on trial in Paris on murder charges.
1999 – Maltese-registered tanker, the Erika, breaks in two during a violent storm off the north-west coast of France, spilling some three million gallons of heavy oil.
2006 – Death of Emmy-winning actor Peter Boyle, who played the tap-dancing monster in the movie Young Frankenstein and grouchy father Frank Barone in the TV series Everybody Loves Raymond.
2011 – Police take into custody Hohepa Morehu-Barlow, also known as Joel Barlow, 36, who is accused of defrauding Queensland Health of $16 million.
2012 – A sexual harassment claim against former House of Representatives Speaker Peter Slipper is dismissed, with the judge describing it as a “political attack”.
2013 – Australia’s High Court strikes down the ACT’s same-sex marriage laws.
2015 – In Paris, delegates from 195 countries approve an agreement that seeks to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
2016 – Human remains found two weeks earlier inside a septic tank at a property in Brisbane’s north are identified as belonging to 29-year-old Wayne Youngkin, who disappeared in 1986.
Today’s Birthdays:
Gustave Flaubert, French author (1821-1880); Edvard Munch, Norwegian artist (1863-1944); Frank Sinatra, US singer-actor (1915-1998); John Osborne, English playwright (1929-1994); Dionne Warwick, US singer (1940-); Sheree J Wilson, US actress (1958-); Jennifer Connelly, US actress (1970-); Quan Yeomans, Australian musician, (1972-); Mayim Bialik, US actress (1975); Craig Moore, Australian soccer player (1975-).
Thought For Today:
There are two cardinal sins from which all the others spring: impatience and laziness. – Franz Kafka, Czech author (1883-1924).
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