Did You Know? From a Chicken’s 13-Second Flight to World-Changing Moments on This Day in History
Since collecting a hefty divorce settlement, this woman, Mackenzie Scott, has given away $23 billion, including 7.1bn in 2025.
Image: File
Did you know?
The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds.
On this day in history, December 15
1488 Bartolomeu Dias returns to Portugal after rounding the Cape of Good Hope.
1840 Napoleon Bonaparte gets a French state funeral in Paris – 19 years after his death.
1899 The British under General Redvers Buller make a frontal attack in the Battle of Colenso to relieve Ladysmith. They lose more than 1 100 men to the Boers’ eight. This third British defeat brings ‘Black Week’ to an end.
1914 A gas explosion at Mitsubishi Hōjō coal mine, in Kyushu, Japan, kills 687 people.
1929 Swiss pilot Walter Mittelholzer is the first to fly over Mt Kilimanjaro.
1939 Gone with the Wind (the most successful film – inflation adjusted) premières.
1944 Big-band leader, Glenn Miller dies when his plane crashes into the English channel.
1979 Chris Haney and Scott Abbott develop the game, Trivial Pursuit.
1995 EU leaders announce that their new currency would be known as the euro.
2001 The Leaning Tower of Pisa reopens after 11 years and $27 million spent to stabilise it, but without fixing the famous lean.
2006 American blues legend BB King is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President George W Bush.
2016 US white supremacist Dylann Roof is found guilty of the Charleston Church Massacre which killed 9 people.
2013 China lands its moon rover on the moon, becoming the fourth country to do so after the US, USSR and India.
2017 Teenage Palestinian Ahed Tamimi is filmed slapping Israeli soldiers. The clip goes viral. She becomes a symbol of resistance to Israeli occupation, but is arrested and jailed 4 days later.
2019 Protests against India’s new citizenship bill that excludes Muslims, erupt across major cities, killing at least five.
2020 MacKenzie Scott announces that she has given away more than $4 billion – part of her record divorce settlement from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Today the figure stands at $26.3bn, including $7.1bn in 2025.
2024 More than 50 people are killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes as the death toll for Palestinians killed in the Israel-Gaza War surpasses 45 000.
DAILY NEWS