Not bad for a day's work

Did you know that . . .

The deepest freshwater lake in the world is Lake Baikal, in Siberia. It plunges a mile to a whopping depth of 5 315 feet (1 620m)

On this day in history

1838 Andries Pretorius arrives at the laagers on the banks of the Klein-Tugela in reply to a plea for help against the Zulus.

1895 British Bechuanaland (the country of the Tswana) is annexed to Cape.

1880 Notorious Australian outlaw Ned Kelly is hanged.

1918 An armistice is signed, silencing the guns of World War I, effective at 11am, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. In many countries, a moment of silence in memory of the millions of fallen soldiers is still observed. It began in Cape Town when businessman JA Edgar suggested his church observe a period of silence for the many South Africans killed in the Battle of the Somme. Later, Cape Town Mayor Harry Hands, whose son was killed on the Western Front, took it further, initiating a period of silence to remember sacrifices made on the battlefields of Europe. Jock of the Bushveld author Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, whose son also died on the Western Front, wrote a letter that reached England’s king, proposing that two minutes of silence become part of Armistice Day commemorations. The proposal was accepted and so began the tradition during remembrance occasions – a unique South African gift to the world.

1943 The Nazis running the Theresienstadt concentration camp, torture 47 000 Jews, forcing them to stand exposed for 8 hours in the bitterly cold November rain.

2000 155 skiers and snowboarders die when a cable car catches fire in Kaprun, Austria.

2015 The Canadian city of Montreal begins the controversial dumping of raw sewage (8bn litres) into the St Lawrence River.

2018 Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba sets a new record for their Singles Day sale – $1 billion in 85 seconds, $30.8bn in 24 hours.

2023 The Icelandic town of Grindavík is evacuated after thousands of earthquakes and rising magna point to an imminent eruption.

2023 Kimba, an escaped circus lion, roams the streets of Italian seaside town Ladispoli for five hours before being recaptured.

2024 35 people are killed by a 62-year-old male rams his car into crowds at a sports centre in Zhuhai, southern China. He is swiftly executed in January 2025.

DAILY NEWS