IN HISTORY

600 Pope Gregory the Great decrees saying “God bless you” is the correct response to a sneeze.

1796 Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) falls to the British, completing their invasion of the island.

1866 Spencer Compton Cavendish, marquess of Hartington, becomes British secretary of war.

1877 Chief Sekukuni of the Bapedi signs a peace treaty with the Boers in the Transvaal.

1878 Silver dollar becomes legal tender. 1898 News starts to emerge about

Spain’s “reconcentrado” policy – a forerunner of the British concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War and the Nazi death camps 40 years later. As many as 350 000 civilians would die in the Cuban camps.

1909 First subway car with side doors goes into service in New York City.

1916 The US rejects the right of Germany and Austria-Hungary to sink armed merchant ships.

1917 The first synagogue in 425 years opens in Madrid, Spain.

1923 Howard Carter opens the inner burial chamber of the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s treasure-laden tomb and finds the sarcophagus.

1933 The Blaine Act ends Prohibition (a 13-year ban on alcohol) in the US.

1939 Ichthyologist Professor JLB Smith sees the coelacanth, caught seven weeks earlier near East London, for the first time.

1940 The German tanker Altmark is boarded by sailors from the British destroyer HMS Cossack and, after handto-hand fighting with bayonets and the last-recorded Royal Naval action with cutlass, 299 captive sailors from vessels sunk by the battleship Graf Spee are freed.

1942 Japanese soldiers machine-gun 22 nurses and 60 soldiers and crew members from two sunken ships when they wash up on Bangka Island.

1945 Late-comer to the war, Venezuela, declares war on Nazi Germany.

1959 Fidel Castro becomes the premier of Cuba.

1960 The US Navy submarine USS Triton leaves New London, in the US state of Connecticut, to begin the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe.

1992 The remains of former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie are found on the grounds of the imperial palace – under the private lavatory of dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, who overthrew him.

2005 The Kyoto Protocol, meant to reduce global warming, comes into force, following its ratification by Russia.

2006 The last Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) is decommissioned by the US army.

2013 Actress Angelina Jolie undergoes a preventive double mastectomy after learning that she had an 87% risk of developing breast cancer.

2018 More than 100 00 orangutans have been killed in Borneo since 1999, according to a study published in the journal, Current Biology. |