Police officers, their firearms drawn, walk towards bodies lying on the ground. In the background is a police vehicle. Police opened fire on striking miners armed with machetes and sticks at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine on August 16, 2012. Picture: Reuters
Significant and interesting snippets of news with a South African angle, from this day in history
1796 The capitulation of Saldanha Bay – the unconditional surrender to the British Royal Navy of a near-mutinous Dutch expeditionary force that has been sent to recapture the Dutch Cape Colony.
1800 The bilingual Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser is first published. It is the first South African paper to publish both news and advertisements.
1835 Solymon Merrick patents the wrench.
1896 Gold is found in a tributary of a river in Canada, setting off the Klondike Gold Rush.
1869 A Paraguayan battalion made up of children is massacred by the Brazilian army during the Battle of Acosta Ñu.
1927 The Dole Air Race begins from California to Hawaii, during which six out of the eight competitors crash or disappear.
1929 Riots start in Mandatory Palestine, causing the deaths of 133 Jews and 116 Arabs.
1940 Germany’s Adolf Hitler orders a blockade of Britain.
1945 Puyi, the last Chinese Emperor and ruler of Manchukuo, is captured by Soviet troops.
1945 Korea is divided into North and South Korea along the 38th parallel.
1946 George Orwell’s Animal Farm is published.
1980 Baby Azaria Chamberlain disappears while her parents camp in the Australian outback at Ayers Rock. Her mother is wrongly convicted and jailed for murder.
1988 Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and the US ambassador to the country die in a plane crash.
1993 South Africa relinquishes sovereignty of Walvis Bay to Namibia.
1998 US President Bill Clinton admits he had an ‘improper physical relationship’ with intern Monica Lewinsky and ‘misled people’.
2001 Banned activist and newspaper editor Donald Woods, 67, dies of cancer in London.
2012 Police shoot striking miners and kill at least 34 of them at Marikana, North West.
2018 The world’s first floating dairy farm opens in Merwehaven harbour, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, with the 40 cows milked by robots.
2020 At least 17 people are killed in an attack on a beach resort in Mogadishu, Somalia, by the al-Shabab group.
2021 US President Joe Biden says, “I stands squarely behind my decision” to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, despite the sudden collapse of the country to the Taliban.
2022 Weather modification programmes are launched along sections of China’s Yangtze River during a severe drought, including seeding clouds with silver iodide rods to encourage rain.
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