ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

1735 Robert Walpole becomes the first British “Prime Minister” (actually, First Lord of the Treasury) to live at 10 Downing Street.

1828 Shaka, Zulu chief and founder of the Zulu empire, is murdered by his two half-brothers Dingaan and Mhlangana. Dingaan assumes the throne.

1888 The first issue of National Geographic magazine is published.

1903 The ice cream cone is patented.

1913 The first batch of Indian passive resisters, comprising 12 men and four women, are arrested at Volksrust and imprisoned in Pietermaritzburg.

1914 A single German submarine sinks three British ironclads, 1 459 die.

1914 Louis Botha, premier of the Union of South Africa, assumes command of the armed forced after having dismissed General Christiaan Beyers because of his resistance to aiding the British in the war against Germany.

1937 Date celebrated as the first International Hobbit Day and the birthdays of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins.

1939 World War II: joint victory parade of Wehrmacht and Red Army in Brest-litovsk at the end of the Invasion of Poland.

1941 The Holocaust in Ukraine: on Jewish New Year’s Day, the German SS murder 6 000 Jews in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. Those are the survivors of the previous killings that took place a few days earlier in which about 24 000 Jews were executed.

1961 Antonio Albertondo (Argentina) completes 1st “double” crossing swim of English Channel in 43hrs 10min, aged 42. 1972 Idi Amin gives Uganda’s 8 000 Asians 48 hours to leave the country.

1979 A bright double flash resembling the detonation of a nuclear weapon is observed near the Prince Edward Islands, in the sub-antarctic Indian Ocean that are part of South Africa, by a satellite. Its cause is never determined.

1980 Iraq invades Iran.

1985 French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius appears on TV to confess that agents of the government, acting on his orders, sank the Greenpeace vessel, Rainbow Warrior.

1998 Troops from South Africa and Botswana cross into Lesotho and storm the royal palace.

1990 Dingaan Thobela, lightweight fighter from South Africa, wins the World Boxing Organisation (WBO) title.

1997 Elton John releases Candle in the Wind 1997, a tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales, in the US.

2015 Volkswagen admits that 11 million of its cars have been wrongly programmed to appear to produce lower emissions than they do.