It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.
Image: Canva
The most dangerous form of blindness is believing that your perspective is the only reality. | Friedrich Nietzsche
South Africa has 11 official languages, one of the highest numbers in the world. Bolivia has 37 officially recognised languages, India 22 and Zimbabwe 16. The most linguistically diverse country is Papua New Guinea, with 840 living languages.
1803 The US buys the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million, more than doubling the size of the young nation.
1859 Charles Dickens’ celebrated novel, the love story A Tale Of Two Cities, is published.
1863 A 65-man French Foreign Legion patrol fights 2 000 Mexican soldiers to the death in Hacienda Camarón in a battle that becomes synonymous with bravery and a never-say-die attitude. It’s the Legion’s most celebrated fight.
1904 The ice cream cone makes its debut.
1930 Josiah Gumede is voted out of office as ANC president for being too close to the Communist Party, and is replaced by Pixley ka Isaka Seme. Chief Albert Luthuli, a future ANC president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, later said: “With his ascendancy, the African National Congress shifted several degrees rightwards into almost total moribundancy.”
1975 The long-running and controversial Vietnam War ends with North Vietnam overrunning Saigon, capital of South Vietnam.
1982 Zambia’s President Kenneth Kaunda meets Prime Minister PW Botha in the first meeting between a Frontline State leader and a South African premier since Kaunda met BJ Vorster in 1976. Kaunda is criticised.
1989 The World Wide Web (WWW) is launched by its inventor, CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee.
2004 Photos surface of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.
2012 International Jazz Day is first held.
2018 The world’s oldest known spider, a female trapdoor, dies, aged 43, after being killed by a wasp in Western Australia.
2018 Nawabshah, Pakistan, sets a global record for April – a sweltering 50.2°C.
2020 British Captain Tom Moore, who raised more than £30 million for the National Health Service walking in his garden, turns 100 and is made an honorary colonel by the Queen.
2022 South African-born Jacky Hunt-Broersma sets a world record for running 104 consecutive marathons in 104 days, after surviving cancer and with a prosthetic leg.
2024 New York police arrest about 300 people. Their crime: they were protesting against Israeli attacks on ordinary people in Gaza.
DAILY NEWS