It was, said Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, seen here with President Nelson Mandela, 'a dastardly act' by the South Africa.
Image: AFP
Everything is either endurable or unendurable. If it’s endurable, endure it & Stop complaining. If unendurable, stop complaining Your destruction will mean its end as well. | Marcus Aurelius
Pigs cannot look up into the sky, an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain, and cows have best friends.
1774 Joachim van Plettenberg, for whom the town and bay is named, is sworn in as the governor of the Cape.
1804 Napoleon Bonaparte becomes Emperor of France, snatching the crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII during the coronation ceremony, and then crowning himself.
1830 The lawn mower is invented.
1897 Dracula, the horror vampire book by Bram Stoker, which would inspire thousands of books and movies, is published.
1934 The Academy Award statuette is first called an Oscar by a gossip columnist.
1944 The bloody Battle for Rome is won when Polish troops scale the heights of Monte Casino. It involved many South Africans. (The Benedictine monastery, said to have been the world’s most glorious, was obliterated three months earlier because an officer mistook the German word for abbot to mean battalion. A senior officer saw the error, but it was too late, the planes were in the air. It was the worst aesthetic disaster of World War II.)
1956 A 19-strong French patrol is found hacked to death in the mountains of Algeria.
1969 Apollo 10 – a dress-rehearsal for a moon landing two months later – is launched. It gets to within 16km of the moon.
1980 With the world’s press watching, Mount St Helens erupts dramatically.
1986 In what Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda termed a “dastardly, cowardly action”, SA forces attack the capitals of Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
1990 A French TGV train clocks a rail world speed record of 515.3km/h.
2009 Sri Lanka’s rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam are finally defeated, ending the bloody and long-running Sri Lankan civil war.
2018 All of Chile’s 34 Roman Catholic bishops offer their resignation to Pope Francis in wake of child sex scandal.
2024 In a go at breaking the record for a gathering of people with the same name, 706 people called Kyle gather in Kyle, Texas. They didn’t come close to the record set by 2 325 people with the surname Ivans in 2017).
2025 The papal inauguration mass of Pope Leo XIV is held at Saint Peter’s Square, Vatican City.
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