ON THIS DAY

Christopher Columbus notes first recorded reference to tobacco.

Winston Churchill, war correspondent of The Morning Post, is captured near Chieveley, Natal, when the Boers ambush an armoured train.

King Gillette patents the Gillette razor blade.

Babu Bodasing, also known as Dulel Sing Bodasing, a prominent sugar cane farmer on the Natal north coast who arrived in Port Natal on September 1,

as an indentured immigrant, dies in Durban. He was probably the wealthiest Indian in Durban and was born in 1853 in Gosheekigurgh, Agra district of Northern India.

Over 1 000 are massacred during a general strike in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

The NBC radio network opens in the US with 24 stations.

Author Herman Charles Bosman is found guilty of murdering his stepbrother and sentenced to death. The sentence was later mitigated and he was released after spending four-and-a-half years in jail.

A decisive Allied victory is declared at El Alamein.

German SS leader Heinrich Himmler orders that Gypsies (Roma) are to be put “on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps”.

Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte are executed for assassinating Mahatma Gandhi, on January 30, the previous year.

Intel releases the world’s first commercial single-chip microprocessor, the 4004.

A chartered Douglas DC-8 crashes near Colombo, Sri Lanka, killing 183.

Wit Wolf Barend Strydom massacres seven Blacks and an Indian and wounds sixteen in the Pretoria city centre. He is arrested by quick-witted taxi driver Simon Mukondoleli, who distracts Strydom while he is reloading his firearm in a shop.

Producers confirm that Milli Vanilli didn’t sing on their album.

Al Jazeera English launches worldwide.

Cyclone Sidr hits Bangladesh, killing an estimated 5 000 people and destroying parts of the world’s largest mangrove forest, the Sundarbans.

BP settles for $4.5 billion over Deep Horizon oil spill.

The Zimbabwean Army detains Robert Mugabe and appoints sacked Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa as interim president. |