Explore a century and a half of milestones, disasters, scientific breakthroughs, and human drama

Quote of the day

Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it’s set a rolling it must increase. | Charles Caleb Colton

Did you know?

If you soak your feet for 20 minutes in hot water (as hot as you can bear) with some epsom salts and half a cup of apple cider vinegar in the water, you can detox your entire body.

On this day in history, February 20

1848 Bishop Robert Gray arrives to become the first Anglican Bishop of Cape Town.

1859 The farm Turffontein in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek is registered in the name of Abraham Smit. The farm became Johannesburg’s first suburb in 1886.

1877 Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet Swan Lake has its première at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre.

1913 Politician King O’Malley hammers in the first survey peg for Canberra – a compromise between rivals Sydney and Melbourne. It is unusual, being a planned city outside a state, like Washington, DC, and Brazil’s Brasília.

1947 A chemical-mixing error in a Los Angeles factory causes an explosion that destroys 42 city blocks.

1962 Astronaut John Glenn becomes the first American launched into orbit. Traveling aboard the Friendship 7 spacecraft, he reaches an altitude of 260 km and completes three orbits in a flight of about five hours. Glenn flew again aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1998, aged 77, making him the oldest person in space until Ed Dwight, 90, in April 2024. In July 2024, fellow nonagenarian William Shatner, also 90, of Star Trek fame, became the oldest person to reach the final frontier.

1988 Heavy rain in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, causes the deaths of 500 people.

2002 A fire on a train from Cairo to Luxor, in Egypt, kills 373 people.

2012 Scientists regenerate a 31 000-year-old plant, Silene stenophylla, from a piece of fruit.

2024 Parental influencer and YouTuber Ruby Franke, 42, and her partner get up to 60 years each in prison for physically and emotionally abusing her six children. Kevin Franke asked that his former wife get the maximum sentence, calling the abuse suffered by his children ‘horrific and inhumane’. Her teenage daughter said: ‘justice has been served.’

2025 Englishman David Lindon sets a world record for the smallest handmade sculpture, just 0.02517 mm by 0.02184 mm, from a Lego brick.

2025 Ex-Spanish soccer boss and UEFA vice-president Luis Rubiales is found guilty of sexually assaulting player Jenni Hermoso by kissing her after the 2023 Women’s World Cup final. He is fined nearly $13 000.

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