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Today in History: Canada issued the world's first coloured circulation coin

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On this day, Oct. 21, in history:

In 1555, Queen Mary of England launched a persecution campaign against Protestants that resulted in the deaths of more than 200 people.

In 1671, New France intendant Jean Talon ordered all bachelors to marry one of the “King’s Girls,” women sent from France to become brides for settlers and soldiers. Talon sweetened the pot by offering 20 pounds, the currency of the day, to men who married before they turned 21. Anyone disobeying Talon’s order would be barred from fishing, hunting and fur trading.

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In 1692, William Penn was deposed as governor of Pennsylvania. His overtures of gratefulness to James II for permitting religious freedom for dissenters of the Church of England led King William III and Queen Mary II to charge Penn with being a papist.

In 1755, a convoy of 24 ships left the Bay of Fundy with about 5,000 expelled Acadians to be resettled in other British North American colonies.

In 1772, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born.

In 1805, Admiral Horatio Nelson’s British fleet defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets at the battle of Cape Trafalgar. Nelson was fatally wounded in the battle but the British captured 20 enemy ships without losing a vessel. This battle was a sequel to the breakdown of Napoleon’s scheme for invading Britain and Trafalgar Day is still marked in England.

In 1833, Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist, inventor of dynamite and founder of the Nobel Peace Prize, was born. A pacifist at heart, Nobel was concerned about the possible uses of his invention. He bequeathed a fund for annual awards for achievement in science and literature and for the promotion of international peace.

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In 1872, Germany gave the San Juan Islands to the United States.

In 1876, the first shipment of wheat from Western Canada to Ontario left Winnipeg.

In 1878, Canadians became known around the globe as great brewmasters when John Labatt’s India Pale Ale won a gold medal at the International Exposition in Paris. Labatt himself developed the recipe for the light-coloured ale at his brewery in London, Ont.

In 1879, inventor Thomas Edison tested the first practical electric light bulb.

In 1880, John A. Macdonald and the Canadian Pacific Railway Co. signed a contract for the construction of a cross-Canada railway. The line was completed to the West Coast with the ceremony of the Last Spike on Nov. 7, 1885.

In 1926, magician Harry Houdini, appearing at the Princess Theatre in Montreal, received a fatal blow to the stomach. A McGill student asked him if he could shrug off blows to the body. Houdini said yes, but before he could brace himself, the blow was dealt. Houdini, who had perfected such feats as escaping from locked underwater boxes while handcuffed, died of a ruptured spleen 10 days later in Detroit.

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Houdini’s condition was reported as grave in this front page Calgary Herald article on Oct. 30, 1926.
Houdini’s condition was reported as grave in this front page Calgary Herald article on Oct. 30, 1926.

In 1944, during the Second World War, U.S. troops captured the German city of Aachen.

In 1950, Communist Chinese forces invaded Tibet.

In 1959, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution that the rights of the Tibetan people should be respected.

In 1959, the Guggenheim Museum, designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, opened to the public in New York.

In 1960, Queen Elizabeth launched Britain’s first nuclear-powered submarine.

In 1966, a giant coal-slag avalanche buried a school and homes in Aberfan, Wales, killing 144 people, including 116 children.

In 1967, tens of thousands of Vietnam War protesters began two days of demonstrations in Washington, D.C.

In 1991, the NDP under Roy Romanow won a hefty majority in a Saskatchewan election, ending nine years of Conservative government under Grant Devine.

In 1999, a Quebec court struck down a key provision of the province’s French Language Charter which stated that French must be the predominant language on commercial signs.

In 2003, Conservatives led by Danny Williams swept to power in a provincial election ending 15 years of Liberal rule in Newfoundland and Labrador. Conservatives captured 34 seats, Liberals 12 and NDP two. Voter turnout was a record 72 per cent.

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In 2003, invoking a hastily-passed law, Florida Governor Jeb Bush ordered a feeding tube reinserted into Terry Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman at the centre of a bitter right-to-die battle. “Terri’s Law” was later struck down by the Florida Supreme Court. The feeding tube was again removed on March 18, 2005 and she died on March 31.

In 2004, the Royal Canadian Mint unveiled the world’s first coloured circulation coin, a quarter that featured a red poppy embedded in the centre of a Maple Leaf, in homage to the 117,000 Canadians who had died serving the nation.

In 2008, in an unprecedented move, the U.S. military dismissed war crimes charges against five Guantanamo Bay detainees after a prosecutor for another detainee resigned in September, alleging the military was suppressing evidence favourable to the defence.

In 2008, Canadian activist Maude Barlow was appointed as the United Nation’s first senior advisor on water issues.

In 2010, Russell Williams, the former colonel in charge at CFB Trenton, was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences with no possibility of parole for 25 years in the torture, rape and murders of Cpl. Marie-France Comeau and Jessica Lloyd. He also received 10 years each for two sexual assaults and a one-year sentence for 82 fetish break and enters. He had pleaded guilty in court on Oct. 18 and graphic and disturbing evidence was presented on his dark descent into sadosexual crimes.

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In 2010, the beleaguered RCMP shook up its management with the appointment of two veteran officers to oversee operations — Steve Graham in the East and Gary Bass in the West. It followed a summer of discontent amid accusations of bullying by commissioner William Elliott and persistent concerns the pace of much-needed modernization was too slow.

In 2010, in a unanimous 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Iraq can’t rely on state immunity to thwart Kuwait’s efforts in Canada to seize assets, including planes made by Bombardier.

In 2010, Toyota recalled 1.53 million Lexus, Avalon and other models, mostly in the U.S. and Japan, for brake fluid and fuel pump problems, the latest in a string of quality lapses for the world’s No. 1 automaker. The Canadian division of the automaker recalled about 28,700 vehicles.

In 2012, Kateri Tekakwitha became the first indigenous woman from North America to become a Catholic saint. She was born in New York state in 1656 before fleeing to a Mohawk reserve outside Montreal to escape opposition to her Christianity. She died in 1680 at the age of 24. Her body is entombed in a marble shrine at the St. Francis-Xavier Church in the Montreal-area Mohawk community of Kahnawake.

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In 2014, Brian Bowman was elected as mayor of Winnipeg, becoming the first Indigenous mayor of a major Canadian city. (He was sworn in on Nov. 4.)

In 2014, a South African judge sentenced double-amputee Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius to five years in prison for the lesser charge of manslaughter in the killing of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day in 2013. (In 2015, he was released from prison and moved to house arrest, but an appeals court overturned the lower court decision and convicted him of murder. He was sentenced to six years in prison, but the State appealed the sentence. In November 2017, the South African Supreme Court of Appeal more than doubled it to 13 years and five months.)

In 2018, despite Mexican efforts to stop them at the border, about 2,000 Central American migrants swam or rafted across a river separating that country from Guatemala, re-formed their mass caravan in Mexico and vowed to resume their journey toward the United States.

In 2019, the Liberals secured a minority-government victory in Canada’s 43rd general election. A resurgent Bloc Quebecois tripled its seats in the province to 32 and the Liberals were shut out of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The Liberals had 157 seats — 13 short of the 170 needed for a majority in the 338-seat House of Commons. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, whose party boosted its seat count to 121 and won the popular vote nationwide by a slight margin, predicted the Liberal minority would be short-lived. The NDP ended with 24 seats, the Green Party 3 and one independent was elected.

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In 2020, the European Union awarded its top human rights prize to the Belarus opposition movement and its leader, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who fled to Lithuania following a widely criticized August election that kept President Alexander Lukashenko in power and saw a brutal crackdown on protesters. European Parliament President David Sassoli praised the Sakharov Prize laureates for their courage, resilience and determination.

In 2020, New Democrat, Green and Independent MPs joined with the Liberals to help Justin Trudeau’s minority government weather its most serious confidence test yet. They defeated a Conservative motion to create a special anti-corruption committee that would have probed alleged misspending of pandemic relief funds. The motion was defeated by a vote of 180-146, with Conservative and Bloc Quebecois MPs supporting it.

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