ON THIS DAY

IN HISTORY

971 Using crossbows, Song dynasty troops soundly defeat a war elephant corps of the Southern Han at Shao.

1556 The deadliest earthquake in history occurs when the Shaanxi earthquake, hits Shaanxi province, China. The death toll may have been as high as 830 000.

1795 After an extraordinary charge across the frozen Zuiderzee, the French cavalry capture 14 Dutch ships and 850 guns, in a rare occurrence of a battle between ships and cavalry.

1879 The overnight Zulu attack on Rorke’s Drift ends at about 4am.

1900 The Boers stop a British attempt to break the Siege of Ladysmith in the Battle of Spioenkop.

1903 Colonel Arthur Lynch is found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death for leading the “Irish Commando” alongside the Boers. The sentence is later commuted to life imprisonment

1920 The Netherlands refuses to surrender the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany to the Allies.

1950 The Knesset resolves that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

1957 American inventor Walter Frederick Morrison sells the rights to his flying disc to the Wham-O toy company, which later renames it the “Frisbee”.

1960 The bathyscaphe USS Trieste breaks a depth record by descending to 10 911m in the Pacific Ocean.

1961 The Portuguese luxury cruise ship Santa Maria is hijacked by opponents of the Estado Novo regime with the intention of waging war until dictator António de Oliveira Salazar is overthrown.

1999 Sifiso Nkabinde, secretary-general of the United Democratic Movement, is shot at Richmond, KwaZulu-Natal.

2002 US journalist Daniel Pearl is kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan, and subsequently murdered.

2003 A very weak signal from spacecraft Pioneer 10, launched in 1972, is detected for the last time. It was 12 billion kilometres from earth.

2018 A double car bombing in Benghazi, Libya, kills at least 33 people.