In Hong Kong 1959: Twenty-two women, mostly farmers' wives, were arrested after they attacked police who had come to investigate their interference with Public Works Department workmen building a public path near Sha Tau Kok. The group from the Kong Ha Village believed the construction of a 70-metre path would obstruct fulfilment of a legend - that a future emperor or great man would be born in their locality. 1962: Magistrate T L Yang declared there were too many hooligans in the colony as he ordered five teenaged boys who had been in a gang fight to be placed under probationary supervision for two years. 1964: The President Hotel announced two performances by 'Mr Rhythm' Frankie Laine at the Nine Dragons Supper Club. A champagne dinner and show for the American singer, famous for his hits Jezebel, Mule Train and I Believe, were $50. 1966: Hollywood producer-director Robert Wise, who was in town to shoot the Steve McQueen film, The Sand Pebbles, held a party in his suite at The Peninsula hotel after being awarded the best director Academy Award for his work on The Sound Of Music. 1972: Police smashed an organised 'anti-British' student movement which was planning to disrupt the Queen's Birthday Celebration parade. Eight men and three women were detained. Around the world 1775: At the beginning of the American War of Independence, the British under Thomas Gage at Concord and Captain John Parker at Lexington were defeated by the Americans. 1824: English poet Lord Byron died of a fever while aiding Greek rebels fighting the Turks. 1882: Charles Darwin, the English naturalist who developed the theory of evolution expressed in The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection, died. 1906: Pierre Curie, famed French chemist and physicist, was run over and killed in Paris. Together with his wife Marie, he worked on magnetism and radioactivity. 1927: Actress Mae West was found guilty of indecent behaviour in her Broadway production Sex. 1943: In World War II, Polish Jews drove 2,000 German troops from the Warsaw ghetto in a failed rebellion against the Nazis. 1951: The first Miss World contest took place in London; the winner was Miss Sweden. 1960: A student uprising toppled the authoritarian government of South Korean President Syngman Rhee. 1967: The unmanned US spacecraft Surveyor 3 landed on the moon. 1989: Forty-seven crewmen died in an explosion on the US battleship USS Iowa during Atlantic manoeuvres. 1995: A car bomb tore apart Oklahoma City's Alfred P Murrah building, killing 168. 1997: The first ship to sail directly to Taiwan from China in 48 years steamed into Kaohsiung port, completing a historic crossing of one of the world's great political divides. 2000: A Philippine airliner crashed on an island near Davao City, killing all 131 aboard in the country's worst air disaster.
