Today in History, 6/2

Highlights in history on this date:

1643 - Dutch mariner Abel Tasman discovers the Fiji Islands.

1840 - Treaty of Waitangi is signed in New Zealand.

1851 - Ten die in devastating Black Thursday bushfires around Melbourne.

1906 - Bondi Surf Bathers Life Saving Club, believed to be the world's first life-saving club, is founded in Sydney.

1918 - Women over 30 and men over 21 win the right to vote in Britain as the Representation of the People Act receives royal assent.

1938 - Five drown when more than 200 people are swept out to sea by huge seas at Bondi Beach, Sydney.

1943 - Los Angeles jury acquits Australian actor Errol Flynn of three counts of statutory rape.

1958 - Eight members of the Manchester United soccer team are among 23 killed when their plane crashes on the runway at Munich Airport.

1964 - England and France agree on constructing an English Channel rail tunnel.

1976 - The US Lockheed Aircraft Corporation admits it bribed officials in the Netherlands, Japan, Sweden and Italy.

1993 - Death of US tennis star Arthur Ashe, of pneumonia resulting from AIDS, aged 49.

1994 - Martti Ahtisaari wins Finland's first direct presidential election.

1998 - US President Bill Clinton tells journalists he will never resign over the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

1999 - The public gets to see and hear Monica Lewinsky as excerpts of the former White House intern's videotaped testimony are shown at President Bill Clinton's impeachment trial.

2000 - Hillary Rodham Clinton announces her candidacy for the US Senate.

2001 - Ariel Sharon is elected Israeli prime minister in a landslide win over Ehud Barak.

2002 - Athanase Seromba, a Roman Catholic priest accused of participating in the 1994 slaughter of Tutsi by ethnic Hutu in Rwanda, surrenders to the UN Criminal Tribunal.

2006 - Anger over cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed spills violently onto the streets of Afghanistan, as protesters direct their anger against the US.

2008 - Seven doctors and pharmacists go on trial in Paris for the deaths of more than 100 young people who contracted the brain-destroying Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease after being treated with tainted human growth hormones.

2011 - Seventy-one homes are lost as a bushfire sweeps through Perth suburbs.

2012 - On the 60th anniversary of her accession to the British throne, Queen Elizabeth II kicks off five months of jubilee celebrations.

2013 - Federal MP Craig Thomson appears in a Melbourne court on 154 charges of fraud allegedly committed while he was an official of the Health Services Union.

2015 - West Australian Liberal MPs Luke Simpkins and Don Randall commence a spill motion against Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

2016 - An al Qaeda affiliate frees Jocelyn Elliott, an Australian woman kidnapped in Burkina Faso along with her husband.

2017 - Senator Cory Bernardi quits the Liberal Party to form his own party, the Australian Conservatives, citing the government's position on energy and climate change as one of his reasons for leaving.

Today's Birthdays:

Queen Anne of England (1665-1714); Babe Ruth, US baseball star (1895-1948); Ronald Reagan, US president (1911-2004); Zsa Zsa Gabor, Hungarian-born actress (1917-2016); Bob Marley, Jamaican musician (1945-1981); Axl Rose, US rock singer (1962-); Jamie Whincup, Australian racing driver (1983-).

Thought For Today:

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered. - Stanley Kubrick, American movie director (1928-1999)

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