On this day in history: John Lennon assassinated, SA’s biggest fossil find, and elephants can’t jump
John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” remains to this day one of the most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Belgian Ypres territorial battlefield against Germany in the spring of 1915. The area was in the northwest region of Belgium which was known as Flanders. John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” remains to this day one of the most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Belgian Ypres territorial battlefield against Germany in the spring of 1915. The area was in the northwest region of Belgium which was known as Flanders.
Image: https://vfwpost3617.org/patriotism/in-flanders-fields/
Did you know?
Elephants are the only animals that can’t jump.
On this day in history, December 8
1485 Bartholomew Dias anchors for a few days at the present day Walvis Bay, and calls it Golfo de Santa Maria da Conceiçao. He was probably the first European to reach the bay.
1504 Ahmad ibn Abi Jum’ah pens his Oran fatwa, arguing for the relaxation of Islamic law requirements for forcibly converted Muslims.
1906 Britain threatens to intervene in the Congo because of Belgian atrocities.
1914 General Christiaan Beyers, one of the leaders of the rebellious Boers, drowns.
1915 Major John McCrae’s famous World War I poem, In Flanders Fields, emphasising the tragedy of death amidst nature’s beauty, appears anonymously in Punch magazine.
1941 US President Franklin Roosevelt delivers his ‘Day of Infamy’ speech to the US Congress a day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and both the US and Britain declare war on Japan. For Britain it is a relief because the industrial might of America will now fight alongside it.
1941 Japane invades Shanghai, Malaya, Thailand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies. The attacks happens at the same time as the Pearl Harbor attack, but are recorded as a day later because they occur on the other side of the International Date Line.
1966 The Greek ship SS Heraklion sinks in a storm in the Aegean Sea, killing over 200.
1980 Beatle John Lennon is assassinated.
1991 The Soviet Union is dissolved.
1998 The petrified skeleton of a 3.5 million-year-old hominid is found in the Sterkfontein Caves in what is regarded as the biggest archaeological discovery of the century.
2006 Reports surface of Ebola killing 5 000 gorillas in north-western Republic of Congo.
2019 South African-born Mike Horn and Børge Ousland complete an epic 1 800km journey on drifting ice in darkness in the Arctic.
2020 Former Israeli space security chief Haim Eshed says aliens and a galactic federation exist and Donald Trump knows about it, in article published in the Jerusalem Post.
2022 Canadian singer Celine Dion says on Instagram that she has Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS), a rare neurological disorder.
2024 Syrian President Bashar al-Assad flees to Moscow after US and Israeli-backed rebels sweep into the capital city, Damascus.
DAILY NEWS