ON THIS DAY JANUARY 15

588BC Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylon lays siege to Jerusalem under Zedekiah’s reign. The siege lasts two years and results in the razing of the city and the Jews being carted off to Babylon in exile. Before that, Zedekiah tries to flee, and suffers the horror of watching his sons’ beheadings, the last thing he saw before he was blinded by his captors.

1535 Furious that the Pope won’t annul his marriage, Henry VIII makes himself head of the Church in England.

1870 A political cartoon for the first time symbolises the US Democratic Party with a donkey (“A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion”, by Thomas Nast for Harper’s Weekly).

1876 The first newspaper in Afrikaans, Die Afrikaanse Patriot, is published in Paarl to promote Afrikaans as an alternative to Dutch.

1889 The Coca-Cola Company, then the Pemberton Medicine Co, is incorporated.

1919 Great Molasses Flood: a wave of molasses bursts from a storage tank and sweeps through Boston, killing 21 and injuring 150 people.

1943 The world’s largest office building, the Pentagon, in Washington, DC, is completed.

1951 Thought dormant, New Guinea’s Mt Lamington erupts, sending out a “Cloud of Death” rushing at 550km/h, snuffing out all life within 12km (3 000 people).

1951 Ilse Koch, “The Bitch of Buchenwald”, is sentenced to jail for life by a West

German court.

1975 The Alvor Agreement ends the Angolan War of Independence.

1993 Five women, convicted of adultery in Hargeisa, Somalia, publicly stoned to death.

1996 King Moshoeshoe II of Lesotho dies when his intoxicated driver rolls their car down a cliff.

1999 Having failed to graduate once before, enraged agricultural college student David Malebane seeks out and shoots three lecturers before killing himself at the Tompi Seleka Agricultural College in Limpopo. 2001 Wikipedia goes online.

2007 Chimamanda Adichie’s Biafran War novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, is published.

2009 Pilot Chesley Sullenberger “splashes down” US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River just after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia airport due to a bird strike. All passengers and crew survive what becomes known as the “Miracle on the Hudson”.

2019 Start of humanity’s largest gathering, the Kumbh Mela Hindu festival, with

15 million people bathing at the joining of India’s Ganges and Yamuna rivers.