On this day: Lord Black jailed for six years
10 DECEMBER
Grouse shooting season ends today.
1520: Martin Luther burned the Papal Bull excommunicating him from Roman Catholic Church.
1756: Robert Clive took Fulta, India, relieving British fugitives.
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Hide Ad1768: The Royal Academy of Arts was founded. Joshua Reynolds first president.
1845: Pneumatic tyres patented by Scottish civil engineer Robert Thomson.
1868: First edition of Whitaker’s Almanack was published.
1868: London’s first traffic lights began functioning at Bridge Street, near Parliament Square.
1898: Treaty of Paris between United States and Spain, ending the Spanish-American War.
1901: Nobel prizes were first awarded. Among them was a chemistry prize for Marie Curie.
1902: The Aswan Dam on the Nile opened.
1907: Rudyard Kipling awarded the Nobel prize for literature, the first British writer to receive it.
1919: The Smith brothers, aviation pioneers, completed first flight from Britain to Australia.
1921: Albert Einstein won Nobel prize for physics.
1928: Piccadilly Circus Underground station opened.
1937: Thirty-five passengers were killed and 179 injured in rail crash when points were blocked by snow on the Edinburgh-Glasgow line.
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Hide Ad1941: British battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales were sunk off Malaya by Japanese aircraft.
1948: United Nations General Assembly adopted Convention of Genocide and Human Rights.
1963: Zanzibar became independent, after being a British protectorate since 1890.
1967: Former Cunard liner Queen Mary docked at Long Beach, California, at the end of her final cruise, to become a floating hotel.
1989: Czechoslovakia’s first non-communist government for 41 years came to power.
1993: The last shift left Wearmouth Colliery in Sunderland. The closure of the 156-year-old pit marked the end of a coalfield which had been in operation since the Middle Ages.
2007: Former Daily Telegraph owner, Lord Black, was jailed for six and a half years in the US for stealing £3 million from the newspaper empire he built.
2010: 14.9 million people tuned in to watch the live episode of Coronation Street which marked the show’s 50th anniversary.
BIRTHDAYS
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Hide AdAnn Gloag, co-founder, Stagecoach Holdings, 71; Kenneth Branagh, actor and director, 53; Lord Birt, BBC director-general, 1992-2000, 69; Alain de Botton, writer, 44; Roger DeCourcey, ventriloquist, 69; Susan Dey, actress, 61; Paul Hardcastle, music producer, 56; Jahangir Khan, squash player, 50; Raphael Maklouf, sculptor, 76; Summer Phoenix, actress, 35; Meg White, drummer (The White Stripes) and actress, 39.
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1830 Emily Dickinson, American poet; 1891 Earl Alexander, army commander; 1908 Olivier Messiaen, French composer; 1914 Dorothy Lamour, actress and singer.
Deaths: 1747 Duncan Forbes of Culloden, held responsible for the failure of the 1745 Jacobite Rising; 1878 Henry Wells, US transport partner of William Fargo; 1896 Alfred Nobel, Swedish chemist and philanthropist, inventor of dynamite; 1911 Sir Joseph Hooker, botanist; 1928 Charles Rennie Mackintosh; 1934 Luigi Pirandello, dramatist and novelist; 1946 Damon Runyon, writer; 1967 Otis Redding, singer and songwriter.