Today in history
Today is Thursday, October 24, the 297th day of 2019. There are 68 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1648 — The Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years’ War and effectively destroys the Holy Roman Empire.
1860 — The Convention of Beijing makes Kowloon
Peninsula part of the British colony of Hong Kong.
1870 — A huge fire at Lyttelton causes more than £100,000 worth of damage. It destroyed the entire block of buildings bounded by Norwich Quay, and London, Oxford and Canterbury Sts.
1881 — The Auckland Telephone Exchange is
opened.
1922 — The Irish Parliament adopts a constitution
for an Irish Free State.
1929 — Black Thursday: the New York Stock
Exchange loses 12.8% of its value in one day.
1931 — The George Washington Bridge, connecting New York and New Jersey, opens to traffic.
1939 — Nylon stockings are sold to the public for the first time, in Wilmington, Delaware; Nazis require Jews to wear the Star of David in Germany.
1940 — The 40hour work week goes into effect in
the United States.
1945 — The United Nations officially comes into existence as its charter takes effect; Vidkun Quisling, prime minister of Norway during the German occupation, is executed by firing squad in Oslo after being convicted of high treason.
1956 — On the second day of the Hungarian uprising against Stalinist rule, Soviet tanks appear on Budapest’s streets and Imre Nagy is named prime minister.
1962 — The US blockade of Cuba during the missile
crisis officially begins.
1964 — Northern Rhodesia becomes independent as the Republic of Zambia, with Kenneth Kaunda as president.
1970 — Salvador Allende is elected president of
Chile.
1980 — The Polish Government legalises the
independent labour union Solidarity.
1989 — US television evangelist Jim Bakker is
jailed for 45 years for swindling his followers.
1992 — Fifteen years of fundraising is rewarded when the Wanaka community swimming pool officially opens; the Toronto Blue Jays become the first team from outside the US to claim the US Major League Baseball championship.
1994 — British troops are absent from the streets of Londonderry, Northern Ireland, for the first time in 25 years.
1997 —Sierra Leone’s military junta agrees to step down and restore power to elected president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah.
1999 — Argentina’s centreleft Alliance ends 10 years of Peronist rule in presidential elections, with presidentelect Fernando de la Rua promising a ‘‘moral change’’.
2002 — Police investigating a spate of sniper attacks in the Washington DC area arrest two suspects, one a US Gulf War veteran and the other a teenager. The threeweek murder spree left 10 people dead.
2003 — The last three Concorde supersonic passengerjet flights land at Heathrow Airport outside London, ending the luxury plane’s 27 years of commercial service. The British Airways planes departed from New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
2005 — Rosa Parks, who galvanised the US civilrights movement by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, in the segregated South half a century earlier, dies aged 92.
2007 — Embarking on an ambitious 10year moonexploration programme, China launches its first lunar probe. It is a leap forward in the Asian space race, which gives a boost to national pride, and the promise of scientific and military payoffs.