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SCMP Reporter

In Hong Kong

1962: Film star Nancy Kwan married 22-year-old Austrian hotelier Peter Pock, in London. The 23-year-old star of The World Of Suzie Wong met her husband in Innsbruck when she was shooting her latest film The Main Attraction.

1964: The Beatles, with temporary drummer Jimmy Nichol, were due to arrive at Kai Tak. Frankie Blaine, the promoter of their shows, said: 'I think for once Hong Kong should be able to say it had a famous act before any Far Eastern country. I would like Hong Kong to have a reputation for world-famous entertainment - hence the Beatles coming here instead of Manila or Tokyo.'

1967: The Eagle's Nest in the Hong Kong Hilton announced two shows by crooner Rudy Vallee. The American was one of the United States' most popular singers in the 1920s.

1969: Arthur Bardens, the man who helped introduce television to Hong Kong, retired and left the colony after 23 years. The chief engineer at Rediffusion had arrived in the territory in 1946.

Around the world

1832: The first parliamentary Reform Act came into force in Britain, redistributing parliamentary seats and expanding the electorate.

1893: Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of passive resistance was born when he was thrown off a segregated train in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

1906: The famous Cunard passenger liner Lusitania was launched. It was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915.

1929: The Papal State was revived when the Vatican was established in Rome. It had not existed since 1870.

1939: King George VI and Queen Elizabeth crossed from Canada to the US to become the first British monarchs to visit the United States.

1942: The Battle of Midway came to an end, inflicting the first major naval defeat of the war on the Japanese forces in World War II.

1948: President Edvard Benes of Czechoslovakia resigned, rather than making the country a communist state.

1965: Sony introduced the first ever home videotape recorder in Japan.

1970: Edward Morgan Forster, English novelist notably of A Passage To India, died.

1971: The Soviet spacecraft Soyuz II docked in space with the Salyut space station.

1973: Willy Brandt visited Israel, the first visit by a West German leader to the country.

1980: Henry Miller, the famed US author of Tropic Of Cancer and Tropic Of Capricorn, died.

1988: Bangladesh, the world's third largest Muslim nation, made Islam its state religion as riot police went on alert to prevent protests against the law.

1996: Burma's military rulers passed a stiff new law effectively muzzling Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition party.

2000: In Sri Lanka a cabinet minister and 22 others were killed in a suicide bomb blast in a southern suburb of Colombo as the country marked its War Heroes Day.



Today in history