It wasn't just another day.
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“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” | C.S. Lewis
Mzansi is an informal name for South Africa and, like the isiXhosa word uMzantsi, comes from the same Nguni language root (-zantsi, meaning south).
1775 Four people are buried by an avalanche for 37 days in Italy. Three of them survive.
1910 Thomas Thornton becomes the first air passenger in South Africa when he pays Albert Kimmerling £100 for a short flight from Sydenham Hill in Johannesburg. On the same day, Rand reporter Julia Stansfield becomes the first woman passenger when Kimmerling takes her on a flight over the city.
1945 Off Japan, a dive bomber hits the aircraft carrier USS Franklin, killing 724 of her crew.
1982 Argentina invades Britain’s South Georgia Island, starting the Falklands War.
1990 Willie Hepburn sets a South African land speed record of 372.4km/h in a custom-built 7-litre Pontiac Trans Am on the N3 near Villiers. The record still stands for a road-legal car.
1994 The world’s largest omelette is made using 160 000 eggs in Yokohama, Japan.
1998 Makhaya Ntini becomes the first Black South African cricketer to play in a five-day Test match.
2003 Airstrikes by an American- and British-led coalition signal the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, without UN support and in defiance of world opinion.
2018 The world’s last male northern white rhino, 45-year-old Sudan, dies in Kenya.
2019 A “superbloom” of poppies in Walker Canyon, southern California, after high rainfall is so big that it is visible from space.
2021 Icelandic volcano Fagradalsfjall erupts for the first time in 800 years after more than 50 000 earthquakes.
2024 Finland is ranked by the UN as the happiest country in the world for the seventh year in a row. Afghanistan is last, while South Africa is ranked 83rd.
2024 Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott says her organisation, Yield Giving, is donating $640 million to 361 non-profits after an open call for applications. Heavily involved in the start-up of Amazon, she received $35.6 billion in a 2019 divorce settlement from her husband, Jeff Bezos, after he left her for another woman. She pledged to give the money away.
2025 New data on dark energy further upends the scientific belief that the universe is constantly expanding. Results show it has instead weakened over the last 4.5 million years.
DAILY NEWS