Wow moments that happened on this day.
Image: ChatGPT
Quote of the Day Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going. | Sam Levenson
Did You Know? The world’s first successful human heart transplant was performed in Cape Town (Groote Schuur Hospital) in 1967.
2016 Explorer Walter Raleigh is released after 13 years of being locked up in the Tower of London and told to go seek gold in Guyana.
1703 Akō incident: 46 of the 47 surviving Ronin commit seppuku (ritualistic suicide) for avenging their master’s death in Edo.
1902 In the British House of Commons, Prime Minister David Lloyd George suggests that there are as many as 30 000 armed Blacks working for the British military in South Africa.
1904 Fietas, Johannesburg, a mixed-race area, is burned down because of bubonic plague.
1915 Einstein’s theory of relativity is published.
1920 Pierre van Ryneveld and Quintin Brand arrive in Wynberg after the first flight from London to Cape Town. It took a month and a half and leads to the formation of the South African Air Force, the world’s second-oldest.
1930 American fast-food restaurant chain KFC is founded by Colonel Harland Sanders in North Corbin, Kentucky.
1942 General Douglas MacArthur vows, “I came through and I shall return” after escaping the Japanese-occupied Philippines.
1947 A record 18-ton blue whale is caught and killed in the South Atlantic.
1995 Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II addresses Parliament in Cape Town.
1995 A sarin gas attack in Japan’s Tokyo subway system during rush hour kills 12 people and injures more than 6 200.
2001 The Petrobras 36 Oil Platform, the world’s largest oil rig, sinks with 400 000 gallons of fuel and crude oil aboard.
2012 Fifty people are killed and 240 injured in a wave of attacks across 10 cities in Iraq.
2019 Four men are arrested in South Korea for secretly filming 1 600 hotel guests and selling the footage via a website.
2020 India hangs four men for the 2012 gang rape and murder of a woman on a bus in New Delhi that sparked global condemnation.
2020 An Australia report says bush fire smoke kills more people than the fires (417 vs 33).
2024 Zambian-born Vaughan Gething becomes Wales’ new first minister and the first black government leader in Europe.
2025 Zimbabwe’s Kirsty Coventry is the first woman and the first African elected president of the International Olympic Committee.
DAILY NEWS