ON THIS DAY SEPTEMBER 12
490BC Traditional date for the Battle of Marathon, where the Greek army inflicted a crushing defeat on the more numerous Persians. The messenger Pheidippides ran 42.2km to Athens in intense heat to tell of the victory. Exhausted, he exclaimed ‘Nike!’ – or Victory! – and promptly dropped dead from exhaustion. That’s where the name Nike and also the name of the foot race come from.) 1755 Casanova is sentenced to 5 years in jail for offending religion and common decency. 1857 The SS Central America sinks off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, with about 15 tons of gold from the California Gold Rush.
1933 Leó Szilárd, waiting in his car for a red light, figures out the nuclear chain reaction. 1943 Italian dictator Benito Mussolini is rescued from a remote mountain-top hotel by German commandos in a daring raid.
1977 Civil rights leader Steve Biko is beaten to death while in custody.
1989 Advocate Anton Lubowski, the secretarygeneral of the Swapo is shot dead at close range outside his luxury home in Windhoek. 1995 In an incident recalling the most violent excesses of the cold war, Belarussian combat aircraft shoot down a balloon that flew over the border from Poland while competing in a race. The two American crewmen are killed. 2005 The bodies of more than 40 patients are found in a flooded hospital in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in August.
2012 Excavators announce that they may have found the remains of King Richard III of England under a car park in Leicester
2015 12 tourists mistaken for militants, are killed by Egyptian forces in the Western Desert. 2017 A monster fatburg, 250m long – the length of two football pitches, and weighing 130 tons is found in London sewers. The stinky job of removing the solid mass of putrid waste, composed of fat and household disposables, like nappies and wet wipes, takes three weeks. 2018 The oldest known human drawing
– 73 000 years old – is discovered in Blombos Cave, east of Cape Town.
2021 World’s largest container ship, the Ever Ace, 400m-long carrying 24 000 containers arrives in Felixstowe on its maiden voyage. | THE HISTORIAN