ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

602 Western Roman Emperor Maurice is forced to watch his six sons executed before being beheaded. This sparked a 26-year war with Sassanid Persia which would leave both empires devastated before the Muslim conquest.

1703 The first Eddystone Lighthouse is destroyed in the Great Storm of 1703.

1895 Alfred Nobel signs his last will and testament, setting aside his estate to establish the Nobel Prize. He did so after reading a premature obituary that condemned him for profiting from arms sales.

1942 The French navy scuttles its ships and submarines in Toulon harbour to keep them from Nazi hands.

1944 An explosion at a Royal Air Force ammunition dump in Staffordshire kills 70 people.

1960 Patrice Lumumba flees Leopoldville Congo.

1967 French President Charles de Gaulle says ‘Non!’ to British entry to the European Common Market for the second time.

1971 The Soviet Union’s Mars 2 orbiter releases a descent module. It malfunctions and crashes, but is the first man-made object to reach the surface of Mars.

1978 In San Francisco, city mayor George Moscone and openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk are assassinated.

1987 A young man in Somerset, UK, makes headlines when it becomes known he had survived seven suicide attempts.

1989 A Boeing 727 explodes in midair over Colombia, killing 110 people. Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel claims responsibility.

1991 The PAC accuses the ANC of being “guilty of deceit and duplicity” and undermining the Patriotic Front Alliance “in cahoots with the regime”.

1997 Before the TRC, leaders of the UDF distance themselves from Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s actions after the death of Stompie Seipei.

2001 A hydrogen atmosphere is found on the extrasolar planet Osiris by the Hubble Space Telescope, the first atmosphere detected on an extrasolar planet.

2005 First partial human face transplant. 2017 A fourth North Korean ghost ship washes up in Japan with eight skeletons on board. |