A day of quotes, curiosities and defining moments in history
It was suicide, but still they rode out; men and horses against tanks.
Image: Grok.ai
Quote of the day
If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got | Henry ford
Did you know?
Cupid’s arrows weren’t always romantic – In Roman mythology, Cupid’s arrows could make people fall in love or fill them with indifference, depending on the tip of the arrow. Love was literally a gamble!
On this day in history, February 16
600 Pope Gregory the Great decrees that ‘God bless You’ is the correct response to a sneeze in bubonic plague-ravaged Europe, where a sneeze was often a sure sign of the plague.
1796 Colombo in Ceylon falls to the British, who complete their invasion of the island.
1877 Chief Sekukuni of the Bapedi signs a peace treaty with the Boers in the Transvaal.
1898 Spain’s ‘reconcentrado’ policy in Cuba – a forerunner of the British concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War and the Nazi death camps 40 years later – becomes known.
1920 South Africans Pierre van Ryneveld and Quintin Brand take off from Brooklands, Surrey, in their Vickers Vimy bomber, Silver Queen, hoping to become the first airmen to fly from England to Cape Town. After wrecking two of the biplanes – the first in Egypt and the second at Bulawayo – they arrive in Cape Town in an ‘Imperial Gift’ aircraft on March 20.
1939 Ichthyologist Professor JLB Smith sees the ‘extinct’ coelacanth – caught seven weeks earlier near East London – for the first time.
1942 In one of World War II’s most brilliant but overlooked delaying actions, on hearing the order, ‘Mount up!’ the battered and exhausted men of the 26th US Cavalry (Philippine Scouts) climb astride their horses and fling themselves, once again, against the blazing gun muzzles of the invading Japanese tanks. To the surprise and shock of the cavalrymen and Japanese commanders alike, they scattered and drove back the armoured squadrons during their ‘hell-bent-for-leather’ strike. But they did pay a terrible toll, and their mounts suffered worst of all.
1992 The remains of former Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie are found on the grounds of the imperial palace – beneath the private lavatory of dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, who had overthrown Selassie.
2018 More than 100 000 orangutans have been killed in Borneo since 1999.
2020 The ‘ghost ship’ cargo vessel MV Alta is washed up on the Irish coast by Storm Dennis after drifting across the Atlantic from Bermuda.
2024 Alabama Supreme Court rules frozen embryos can be considered children as part of a wrongful death case where frozen embryos were accidentally destroyed at a clinic.
DAILY NEWS