TODAY IN HISTORY

• International Day of Persons with Disabilities • 2018 - Croatia

Croatia’s Luka Modric won the Ballon d’or award, the prestigious prize given to the best footballer in the world. The Real Madrid midfielder beat five-time winner Cristiano Ronaldo and World Cup winner Antoine Griezmann to the honour at a ceremony in Paris. He also broke the 10year reign of Ronaldo and Messi, who have shared the award between themselves in the last 10 years.

• 2018 - Nigeria

Spiritual director of Adoration Ministry Enugu, Ejike Mbaka, said Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party and Peter Obi, his running mate, will end in shame with the way they are going. The Catholic priest said this after Obi failed to make donations at the ministry’s 2018 harvest and bazaar celebration.

• 2018 - USA

A new leak website, Distributed Denial of Secrets, made its debut wrestling with what to make available to the public, an illustration of the difficulty of balancing full transparency with respect for privacy in an age of mass disclosures.

• 2015 - S/africa

In South Africa Oscar Pistorius was convicted of murder by an appeal court that described the onceglittering story of the double-amputee Olympian and Reeva Steenkamp, the girlfriend he killed in his home in 2013, as a human tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

• 2013 - N/korea

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un dismissed from his post Jang Song Thaek, a powerful uncle and a man key to his rise to power.

• 2010 - USA

Wikileaks struggled to stay online as firms and governments cut its access to the Internet, a potentially crippling blow to the firm releasing secret information via the web. Online payment service provider Paypal cut off the account used by Wikileaks to collect donations

• 1979 - Iran

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became the first Supreme Leader of Iran.

• 1976 - Jamaica

An assassination attempt was made on Bob Marley in Kingston, Jamaica just two days before the "Smile Jamaica" free concert.

• 1967 - S/africa

At Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, a team led by Christiaan Barnard carried out the first heart