From Mars’s Odd Shape to the iPhone Revolution: Today’s Strange, Shocking and World-Changing Moments in History

Did you know?

Mars isn’t actually round. Unlike any other rocky planet in the Solar System, Mars is actually shaped like a rugby ball, but with different sizes along all three axes.

On this day in history, January 9

1349 The Jewish population of Basel – all 700 of them – believed by the residents to be the cause of the ongoing Black Death, is rounded up and burned alive.

1822 Portuguese prince Pedro I of Brazil decides to stay in Brazil against the orders of the Portuguese king, João VI, beginning the Brazilian independence process.

1945 US soldiers led by General Douglas MacArthur invade the Philippines.

1951 The global peacekeeping body, the UN, which replaced the League of Nations in 1945, opens its headquarters in New York.

1954 A bone-numbing Greenland record of -66°C is recorded at Northice Station.

1967 Former Springbok skipper Gary Teichmann is born in Gwelo, Zimbabwe. He showed his leadership qualities when was appointed captain of the Natal Sharks by Ian McIntosh and went on to captain the Boks 36 times out of the 42 games he played for them.

1980 Sixty-three men are beheaded by the sword in Saudi Arabia for an attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, in November.

1986 A limpet mine explodes and damages a substation in Jacobs, Durban. Later a second one explodes and kills a policeman and injures others, as well as two electrical workers who arrived at the scene of the first explosion.

1996 First Chechen War: Chechen separatists launch a raid against the helicopter airfield and a civilian hospital in the city of Kizlyar, in neighbouring Dagestan, which turns into a hostage crisis involving thousands of civilians.

2007 Apple CEO Steve Jobs publicly unveils the original iPhone.

2011 Iran Air Flight 277 crashes near Urmia, Iran, in icy conditions, killing 77 people.

2015 The perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris two days earlier are both killed after a hostage situation at a Jewish market in Vincennes.

2015 A mass poisoning at a funeral in Mozambique involving beer contaminated with plant-based bacteria, leaves 75 people dead and more than 230 other people ill.

2025 India’s chief minister of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, MK Stalin offers a $1 million prize offered for anyone who can decipher the script of the ancient Indus civilisation.

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