Black pupils in Western Cape hold marches in solidarity with scholars in Soweto

On this day in history, August 11

1771 Cape governor Ryk Tulbach, after whom the town Tulbach was named, dies.

1772 A volcanic eruption blows 1 300m off the top of Papandayan mountain, in Java, killing 3 000 people.

1858 The Swiss peak Eiger is first conquered.

1904 German-Italian General von Trotha defeats the Herero in South West Africa.

1941 French Marshal Philippe Pétain promises his country’s full support to Nazi Germany, which has invaded a great deal of the country.

1945 Emperor Hirohito of Japan informs the imperial family that he has decided to surrender following devastating firebombing of the Japanese mainland the dropping of atom bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

1951 The Mississippi River floods 100 000 acres in four states: Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Illinois.

1969 The Apollo 11 astronauts are released from quarantine after their trip to the moon.

1972 The last US ground combat unit leaves South Vietnam, with Viet-Cong guerilla tactics winning the war.

1976 African pupils from Langa, Gugulethu and Nyanga, Cape Town, hold marches in solidarity with Soweto students protesting against Afrikaans as a language of instruction – 33 people are shot dead in looting incidents.

1981 Don Estridge unveils the company’s first personal computer, the IBM PC, at New York’s Waldorf Hotel. Priced at $1 565 with 16 kilobytes of RAM, it helps bring computing to the masses.

1988 Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and a Dr Fadl form Al-Qaeda.

1990 Iraqi President Saddam Hussein says he is ready to resolve Gulf crisis if Israel withdraws from occupied territories.

2003 A heat wave in Paris, with temperatures of 44°C, leaves 144 people dead.

2003 Nato takes over the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan – its first major operation outside Europe in its 54-year-history.

2017 Chinese crime writer Liu Yongbiao, after announcing a novel called Beautiful Writer Who Killed, is arrested for the murders of four people 22 years previously.

2021 Sicily records the highest recorded European temperature of 48.8ºC in the city of Siracusa. Although it is less than the hottest recorded temperature on Earth – a blistering 56.7ºC, in Furnace Creek, Death Valley, California on July 10, 1913 This is only the air temperature, with surface heat much higher. There may be places hotter than Death Valley, where the average daily high is 45°C – like parts of the Sahara – however, they are too remote for reliable monitoring.

2024 Closing ceremony for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics at Stade de France features Tom Cruise performing a stunt jump from the roof.

2024 Thousands of people are evacuated near the Greek capital of Athens as large wildfires threaten the city after the hottest June and July on record.

DAILY NEWS