It was one of the great love stories of the world.
Image: Sora
Let us forget the past. Remember the lessons. But hold love and forgiveness in your heart. | Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa
Your stomach lining replaces itself every few days.
1795 France becomes the first country to adopt the metre as the basic measure of length.
1831 Emperor Pedro I of Brazil resigns and goes to Portugal to become King Pedro IV.
1874 Charlotte Maxeke, founder of the Bantu Women’s League, is born in Fort Beaufort.
1926 Italy’s Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, is shot at three times by Violet Gibson (50), but is hit only in the nose as he walks among a crowd in Rome. His nose bandaged, he dismisses the shooting as “a mere trifle” and continues. Almost lynched by the mob, Gibson is arrested but released without charge and deported to Britain, where she lives out her life in an asylum.
1933 Prohibition in the US ends (except in Oklahoma, where it remains for 51 more years).
1945 The Japanese super-battleship Yamato is sunk by American aircraft.
1950 Bechuanaland nationalist leader Seretse Khama is denied permission to see his English wife, Ruth Williams. (Julius Nyerere, the future president of Tanzania, called theirs “one of the great love stories of the world”.)
1969 Symbolic birth date of the internet.
1994 Genocide erupts in Rwanda when Hutu soldiers, police and militia murder key Tutsi and moderate Hutu military and political leaders. The scale and brutality of the 100-day slaughter, which kills 800 000 people, causes shock worldwide and much hand-wringing – just as in the case with Gaza – but no country intervenes. The day is now recognised as the International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda.
2000 Proteas captain Hansie Cronje is charged by Delhi police with match-fixing.
2003 US troops capture Baghdad, Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s regime falls two days later.
2012 An avalanche near the Siachen Glacier buries 130 Pakistani troops. The glacier, which is in the disputed region of Kashmir in the Himalayas, is the highest battlefield on earth, but the real battle is with the inhospitable terrain, which kills more soldiers than combat.
2024 British charity fundraiser Russ Cook (27), also known as “The Hardest Geezer”, runs the length of Africa, arriving at Ras Angela, Tunisia, almost a year (352 days) after leaving Cape Agulhas.
2024 The New York region is hit by a magnitude 4.8 earthquake.
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