Significant and interesting snippets of news, with a South African angle, from this day in history A herd of woolly mammoth.
Significant and interesting snippets of news, with a South African angle, from this day in history
1848 A photograph of the June Days uprising in Paris becomes the first known instance of photojournalism.
1876 At the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Major-General George Custer and the Seventh Cavalry are wiped out by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, in what becomes known as “Custer’s Last Stand”.
1900 Taoist monk Wang Yuanlu discovers a cache of ancient texts in China’s Mogao Caves. Among them is the Diamond Sutra, the world’s oldest-known book.
1904 Cape Town is severly flooded – again.
1940 A conference of editors in Pretoria agrees to voluntary censorship regarding military matters.
1941 Germans invade Dubno, Poland, giving Ukrainians permission to do whatever they want to the region’s 12 000 Jews.
1947 The Diary of a Young Girl (aka The Diary of Anne Frank) is published. It describes the lengths a Dutch jewish family went to evade Hitler’s evil grip in World War II. It was first named Het Achterhuis, after the family’s bolt hole
1948 In response to the USSR-imposed Berlin Blockade, the West launches the Berlin Airlift.
1950 The Korean War begins with the invasion of South Korea by North Korea. South Africa, as one of the founding members of the UN, sends a fighter squadron – No 2 ‘Cheetah’ Squadron flying piston-engined P-51 Mustangs – to aid the South. By the war’s end the squadron had been re-equipped with jet-powered F-86 Sabres, but 74 of the 94 Mustangs and 4 of the 22 Sabres were lost, along with 33 pilots.
1960 Madagascar gains independence.
1975 Mozambique achieves independence.
1982 Porn star John Holmes is acquitted on murder charges over gruesome Wonderland murders in Los Angeles.
2006 During a bloodbath in Jeppestown, Johannesburg, four policemen are ambushed and shot dead by a gang of 23 robbers. The Task Force is then sent in and kill eight of the gang. The remaining 15 surrender.
2017 A tanker carrying fuel bursts into flames in Pakistan, killing more than 200 people.
2021 Former policeman Derek Chauvin is jailed for 22 years and six months for murder after having kneeled on the throat of George Floyd in Minneapolis, even as Floyd complained, “I can’t breathe”.
2022 The 30 000-year-old intact remains of a baby woolly mammoth is found frozen in permafrost in Klondike gold fields in the Yukon, Canada.