FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE

FEBRUARY 15, 1997

COMPUTER genius Bill Gates wakes up every morning £ 12.5million richer than when he went to sleep. Yesterday, as the Dow Jones market index reached the 7,000-point milestone, he saw his worth reach £18billion.

FEBRUARY 15, 2002

UNVEILED by scientists last night, a kitten called Copycat will mean that cats of the future could have more than nine lives. The company which produced her — by the same technique as Dolly the Sheep — plans to charge pet owners thousands of pounds to replicate animals that die.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

MEGAN THEE STALLION, 29. America’s ‘reigning queen’ of rap had a U.S. and UK no 1 in 2020 with WAP, alongside Cardi B. Their performance of the raunchy song at the Grammys led one commentator to say it heralded ‘a weakening of American society’. in 2021, she and Beyonce scooped the Grammy for Best rap Song. CLAIRE BLOOM, 93. The london-born actress was discovered by Charlie Chaplin at the age of 19.

She worked opposite richard Burton and laurence olivier, and played Queen mary in The King’s Speech and the Doctor’s mother in Doctor Who. married three times, her husband’s included actor rod Steiger and later novelist philip roth.

BORN ON THIS DAY

NIKLAUS WIRTH (1934-2024). The Swiss computer scientist came up with pascal, which ‘influenced every programming language invented afterwards’. in 1984, he won the Turing Award. He has an asteroid named after him, as well as Wirth’s law, which states: ‘Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.’ Wirth died on new Year’s Day. YELENA BONNER (1923-2011). The russian human rights activist was a fierce critic of Boris Yeltsin and vladimir putin. She was married to dissident nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov. After he was sent into exile, she collected his nobel peace prize and had his work published. She said she would have preferred to be a ‘babushka’ than ‘the heroic woman’.

ON FEBRUARY 15…

IN 1942, Singapore fell to Japanese forces. Winston Churchill called it ‘the worst disaster in British history’.

IN 2023, u.S. actress raquel Welch died, aged 82.