Today in history
1521 – Spanish forces under Hernan Cortes capture Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire.
1792 – French revolutionaries imprison the royal family.
1814 – Britain agrees to hand back Dutch colonies seized during the Napoleonic wars – but not the Cape of Good Hope.
1898 – The US Army takes control of the Philippines port of Manila during the Spanish-AmericanWar.
1910 – Florence Nightingale, founder of modern nursing, dies in London aged 90.
1913 – Harry Brearley, of Sheffield, reputedly creates the first ‘‘stainless’’ steel, with a 12.8 per cent chromium content to resist rusting.
1914 – New Zealand’s first casualty of the GreatWar dies. Sapper Robert Arthur Hislop was guarding a railway bridge in Auckland when he fell, and died from his injuries six days later.
1937 – Japanese attack the Chinese city of Shanghai.
1942 – The US Manhattan Project begins, charged with delivering an atomic bomb.
1960 – The first two-way telephone conversation by satellite takes place with the help of Echo 1.
1961 – Construction of the BerlinWall begins with East German soldiers laying down barbed wire and bricks as a barrier between East Berlin and the western section.
2005 – David Lange, former NZ prime minister, dies, aged 63.
2012 – Nadzeya Ostapchuk, of Belarus, is stripped of her shot-put gold medal at the London Olympics after failing a drugs test. Valerie Adams, of New Zealand, is promoted to the gold.
2016 – US swimmer Michael Phelps wins the 23rd, and last, Olympic gold of his career in the 4×100m medley relay.
2020 – Israel strikes a historic deal with the United Arab Emirates to normalise relations between the two countries; President Donald Trump acknowledges starving the US Postal Service of money in order to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots.
Opinion
en-nz
2022-08-13T07:00:00.0000000Z
2022-08-13T07:00:00.0000000Z
https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281642488951429
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