The 'Coolest Dictator In The World', Pie On His Face, And Other Snippets From Back In The Day

Quote of the day

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. – Nelson Mandela

Did you know?

Ears are unique to each person, although less widely used for ID than fingerprints. Nonetheless, ear biometrics is actually surprisingly good, with an accuracy of 90-99%.

On this day in history, February 4

1742 Work on a breakwater begins in Table Bay. It is the beginning of Cape Town’s harbour.

1838 Zulu King Dingaan cedes ‘the place called Port Natal together with all the land annexed from the sea to the north’ to Voortrekker leader Piet Retief and his followers.

1861 Apache chief Cochise is arrested in Arizona by the US Army for raiding a ranch. He escapes and declares war, beginning the Apache Wars, which last for 25 years.

1893 South Africa’s world-renowned expert on early mankind, Professor Raymond Dart is born in Toowong, Australia.

1902 Aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh is born in Detroit, Michigan. He made the first non-stop solo flight from New York to Paris.

1920 South Africans Pierre van Ryneveld and Quintin Brand take off from Brooklands, Surrey, England in their converted Vickers Vimy bomber, Silver Queen, hoping to become the first people to fly from England to Cape Town.

1945 The Yalta Conference between the ‘Big Three’ – British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Franklin Roosevelt, and Russian leader Joseph Stalin – opens in the Crimea to discuss World War II’s final phase and what Europe’s borders will look like.

1976 In Guatemala and Honduras an earthquake kills more than 22 000 people.

1998 Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has a pie thrown in his face in Brussels, Belgium, in a ‘symbolic attack against hierarchical power’.

2013 Paris, France, annuls a 213-year-old law that bans women from wearing trousers.

2023 A high-altitude Chinese ‘surveillance balloon’ is shot down by a US F22 fighter jet off the coast of North Carolina, after having drifted across the US for seven days. Amid a storm of media hysteria, the Biden administration says it was spying for China, which said it was a commercial weather balloon gone astray. Five months later, the Pentagon says that the balloon did not collect information.

2024 President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, the self-titled ‘world’s coolest dictator’, wins re-election in a landslide.

2025 The first clinical trial to transfer genetically modified pigs kidneys into humans is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

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