February 27: A day of change.
Image: Grok.ai
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts. | Winston Churchill
‘I am.’ is the shortest proper sentence in English. This is because it is a complete independent clause, has a subject (‘I’) and a finite verb (‘am’), expresses a full thought, is grammatically correct and makes sense on its own.
1616 Italian polymath Galileo Galilei, who made groundbreaking contributions across multiple fields, is banned by the Church from teaching that the Earth orbits the Sun and is not the centre of the universe.
1844 A violent earthquake hits Cape Town although there is not much to destroy. Other quakes, caused by the Milnerton Fault, occur in 1811, 1809, 1695 and 1620.
1852 The English troop carrier Birkenhead runs aground off Danger Point, Gansbaai. Her sinking becomes one of the earliest maritime evacuations in which the concept of “women and children first” is known to have been applied – chivalrous soldiers stand back, allowing the women and children to escape. The “Birkenhead drill” of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Soldier an’ Sailor Too, came to describe courage in face of hopeless circumstances.
1936 Hitler introduces Ferdinand Porsche’s best-selling Volkswagen (the people’s car).
1960 A New York-bound Alitalia airliner crashes into a field next to a cemetery in Shannon, Ireland, shortly after take-off. Of the 52 people on board, 34 were killed in what a local priest described as, “a scene from hell”.
1991 Coalition planes have a field day, bombing Iraqi forces retreating from Kuwait during the Gulf War, killing hundreds on the so-called “Highway of Death”.
1995 The world’s second-oldest merchant bank, Barings Bank, collapses after rogue securities broker Nick Leeson gambles away billions of pounds while speculating.
2001 The Taliban destroy two giant Buddha statues – the largest standing Buddhas in the world – in Bamyan, Afghanistan.
2020 For the first time in memory, Saudi Arabia bars overseas pilgrims from Mecca and Medina because of Covid-19 fears.
2023 One of the most violent incidents of revenge by mobs of Israeli settlers, who burn 200 buildings in Palestinian villages and kill at least one person after a Palestinian gunman kills two Israelis in the northern West Bank.
2023 A particularly bad winter storm deposits snow in parts of southern California for the first time in decades, down to 1,000 feet elevation, with snow accumulations of up to 7 feet deep in the San Bernardino Mountains.
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