On this day: Lord Black jailed for six years

On this day in 2007, former Daily Telegraph owner Lord Black was jailed for stealing from the empire he helped build. Picture: Getty

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.

1768: 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.

1941: 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

Ann 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.