From KZN Storm Devastation to Super Brat McEnroe, Nude Olympics Chaos, Billion-Dollar Drug Busts, and a Solar System Wall – History, Shockers, and Strange Facts You Can’t Miss

Did you know?

Our solar system has a wall. The heliopause – the region of space in which solar wind isn’t hot enough to push back the wind of particles coming from distant stars – is often considered the ‘boundary wall’ of the Solar System and interstellar space.

On this day, January 21

1077 German King Henry IV petitions Pope Gregory VII for forgiveness. A controversial figure, but one of the most powerful men of the 11th century, he annoyed the church so much that he was excommunicated five times.

1525 The Swiss Anabaptist Movement is founded when Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, George Blaurock, and about a dozen others baptize each other in the home of Manz’s mother in Zürich, breaking a thousand-year tradition of the Catholic Church-state union.

1793 King Louis XVI of France is executed by the guillotine in Paris, following his conviction for high treason during the French Revolution.

1960 A large section of the Coalbrook mine, near Sasolburg, caves in and traps 435 miners, in the country’s worst mine disaster. There are no survivors.

1972 The Reza Shah Museum, in honour of Reza Shah Pahlevi, housed in the Johannesburg house where Iran’s Shah lived from 1942-1944, is inaugurated.

1976 The commercial service of the Concorde supersonic passenger jet begins (London-Bahrain, Paris-Rio).

1986 100 participate in the Nude Olympics race in a chilly 3°C in Indiana, US.

1987 At least 12 people are killed in the KwaMakhuta massacre when the home of the UDF activist Bheki Ntuli is attacked.

1990 US tennis star and ‘Superbrat’ John McEnroe becomes first player to be expelled from the Australian Open, for misconduct.

1994 American Lorena Bobbitt is found not guilty by way of temporarily insanity after she cut off her abusive husband’s penis. She wins the admiration of women around the world.

1999 In one of the largest drug busts in American history, the US Coast Guard intercepts a ship carrying 4 300 kg of cocaine.

2005 Three people die and 500 are left homeless when a tornado cuts a path of destruction through the KZN Midlands. The province had been battered by storms nearly every day from December 17 to January 3, causing millions of rand in damage.

2024 Ecuador finds its largest stash of cocaine – 22 tons worth $1 billion, buried on a pig farm.

2025 79 people are killed in a hotel fire in the ski resort town of Balu in north-west Türkiye.

DAILY NEWS