Significant and interesting snippets of news, with a South African angle, from this day in history
1559 King Henry II of France is mortally wounded in a jousting match.
1859 French acrobat Charles Blondin crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope.
1908 A giant fireball flattens 80 million trees near the Stony Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate, Russia, in the largest impact event in recorded history. The generally agreed upon theory is that a large space rock, 120 feet across, entered the atmosphere of Siberia and detonated, releasing energy equivalent to about 185 Hiroshima bombs.
1934 The ‘Night of Long Knives’ takes place in which German dictator Adolf Hitler stages a bloody purge of the Nazi party.
1941 South African Chief Petty Officer René Sethren, rushes to man a machine gun in place of its fallen gunner and sends up a hail of bullets at attacking German aircraft. Shot 8 times, he refuses to leave his post until the attack is over and is treated for 27 wounds. His valour is such that he is remembered in the naming of a Warrior-class strike craft, SAS Rene Sethren, which during apartheid had been the SAS Oswald Pirow – named after the odious Nazi-sympathiser, lawyer, MP and minister of defence who once prosecuted Nelson Mandela.
1971 The crew of the Russian space mission Soyuz 11 is found dead upon its return to earth – they are the only people to die in space.
1991 The 1913 Native Land Act, an important component of apartheid, is repealed.
1997 In Hong Kong, the flag of the British Crown Colony is lowered at midnight and replaced by a new flag, representing China’s sovereignty and the official transfer of power. This comes after Britain’s lease on Hong Kong runs out.
2009 Yemenia Flight 626 crashes off the Comoros killing 152 people. There is 1 survivor.
2013 Nineteen firemen die in a fire in Arizona.
2019 President Donald Trump becomes the US president to set foot in North Korea.
2021 World’s oldest man is 112-year-old Emilio “Don Millo” Flores Márquez from Puerto Rico, says Guinness World Records.
2021 A heat wave kills 100 people in Canada. By its end on August 12, 595 people have died from it.
2021 American Abhimanyu Mishra becomes the youngest chess grandmaster at 12 years and 4 months.
2022 New York is named world’s wealthiest city, home to 345 600 millionaires, and 59 billionaires, with Tokyo and San Francisco rounding out the top three.
2022 Bongbong Marcos, the son of for Philippine leader Ferdinand Marcos, is sworn in as President of the Philippines