What a day February 25 was!
Image: ChatGPT
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government programme. | Milton Friedman
All the blinking a person does in one day equates to having their eyes closed for 30 minutes.
1797 Disgruntled Irishman Colonel William Tate and his force of 1 000–1 500 soldiers surrender after the last invasion of Britain.
1814 George Cato, Natal pioneer and first mayor of Durban, and from a Huguenot family named Caton, is born in London.
1927 The great diamond rush to Grootfontein, near Lichtenburg, in the Transvaal, starts.
1964 Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) TKOs Sonny Liston in round 7 for his first world heavyweight championship title.
1965 Archbishop Owen McCann of Cape Town becomes South Africa’s first cardinal.
1984 A ruptured oil pipeline explodes and the 1 800ºC blaze, which roars through the southern Brazilian swampland favela (slum) of Cubatao, is so fierce that it incinerates bone and enamel, making a final toll almost impossible to verify. At least 500 people died.
1990 More than 100 000 people attend a rally in Durban addressed by Nelson Mandela, who urges an end to the factional warfare that has killed over 2 500 people in Natal.
1991 The US barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, is hit by an Iraqi scud missile, killing 28 servicemen.
1991 Mosque of Abraham massacre: In the Cave of the Patriarchs in the West Bank city of Hebron, religious extremist Baruch Goldstein opens fire with an automatic rifle, killing 29 Palestinian worshippers and injuring 125 more before being beaten to death.
2014 Hundreds of pro-Russian protesters surround the Crimean parliament and demand a referendum on Crimea’s independence.
2015 At least 310 people are killed in avalanches in north-eastern Afghanistan.
2023 Türkiye widens probe into buildings that collapsed during the February 6 earthquakes, arresting 184 people, as the death toll passes 44 128 (more than 50 000 if Syria is included), with nearly two million people left homeless.
2024 The Great Mosque of Algiers opens. It is the third-largest mosque in the world, able to hold 120 000 worshippers.
2025 A group of 1 000 artists including Annie Lennox, Billy Ocean, and Kate Bush release a lyric-less album to protest a proposed British law allowing developers access to copyrighted material to train AI.
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