Lungless Ants, Future World Leaders In Pivotal Battle Linked to Liverpool FC, And Would You Pay That Much For a House?

Did you know?

Ants don’t have lungs. They instead breathe through spiracles, nine or 10 tiny openings, along the sides of their bodies.

On this day in history, January 32

1795 After a charge across the frozen Zuiderzee lake, the French cavalry captures 14 Dutch ships and 850 guns, in a rare case of a battle between ships and cavalry.

1879 An attack on Rorke’s Drift is repulsed 4am when the decimated Zulu regiments are withdrawn. Eleven VCs (Victoria Crosses) are doled out, largely to divert public opinion from the slaughter of British troops at Islandlwana.

1900 At the Battle Spioenkop (Spy Hill) – the bloodiest battle of the Boer War – the Boers beat off an inept attempt by British troops to break the siege of Ladysmith siege. When the bungling British officers – led by General Sir Redvers Buller, whom the British press began calling ‘Reverse Buller’, and ‘Blundering Buller’ – finally get it right, the town’s starving inhabitants have eaten all their horses. In a bizarre incident the next day, as the victors were collecting rifles from British bodies, a Boer failed to notice that a soldier’s finger, stiffened by rigor mortis, was still hooked around the trigger. When he gave it a tug, the gun went off. It is the only incident of a dead Englishman killing a Boer. So many Lancastrians there died that a grandstand in Anfield Stadium – home of Liverpool FC – is called The Kop, and almost 130 years after the event, battlefield pilgrims still honour the dead by placing Liverpool FC insignia on the graves of unknown soldiers who were buried where they fell. Future world leaders Winston Churchill, Louis Botha and Mahatma Gandhi took part in the battle, which newspaper correspondents described as, ‘an acre of massacre’.

1903 Colonel Lynch is sentenced to death for leading an ‘Irish Commando’ with the Boers.

1999 Sifiso Nkabinde, secretary-general of the UDM, is shot dead at Richmond, in KZN.

2017 America’s most expensive house, with 60 rooms, 8.5 acres, extensive grounds with courts, gardens, and a screening room goes on sale for $250 million in Bel Aire, Los Angeles.

2023 Forty-six days after China adjusted its Covid-19 control strategy, leading to about 1 billion cases of infection, it was finally able to “flatten the curve”. This was an unprecedented achievement, not seen in any other pandemic in history.

DAILY NEWS