Hounded to his death after being outed as a gay, he eats a cyanide-laced apple

1431 French liberation heroine Joan of Arc is falsely accused of relapsing into heresy by donning male clothing, providing justification for her English captors to burn her at the stake.

1874 The first group of Dorsland trekkers leave Pretoria for south-west Angola. (They had to traverse vast, arid areas which lent the trek its name). Of the 3 000 started the trip, about 300 survived the trip.

1889 Édouard and André Michelin start the Michelin tyre company.

1936 England’s Alan Turing submits On Computable Numbers for publication, in which he set out the theoretical basis for modern computers. Despite bad grades at school, he becomes a master cryptologist, is the first to crack the ‘unbreakable’ Enigma code Nazi Germany was using, thereby giving the Allies the edge and helping them win the war. But for all his brilliance and invaluable service in World War II, he was outed as a gay in 1952, convicted, chemically castrated and, as the ultimate insult, his security clearance revoked, meaning he could no longer work. He died after eating a cyanide-laced apple He is remembered for his ground-breaking work in several fields, some of which is used today.

1987 Mathias Rust, an 18-year-old West German pilot, makes an unauthorised landing near Red Square, Moscow. It embarrasses the Soviet leaders and gives Mikhail Gorbachev a reason to remove those who stood in the way of perestroika, the reform of the USSR.

1988 Anti-apartheid Afrikaners, led by Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, meet the ANC in Frankfurt to discuss post-apartheid South Africa.

2016 Harambe, a gorilla at Cincinnati Zoo, is shot after dragging a 3-year-old boy who had slipped into the primate’s enclosure.

2020 Iranian President Hassan Rouhani calls for new protections for women after the ‘honour killing’ of a 14-year-old by her father.

2021 The discovery of a mass grave with the remains of 215 children from Kamloops Indian Residential School is announced by First Nation in British Columbia, Canada.

2024 The Pope apologises for using a homophobic term in a private assembly of Italian bishops, where he reconfirmed the churches ban on gay priests.

DAILY NEWS