Significant and interesting snippets of news with a South African angle, from this day in history:
1054 Siward, Earl of Northumbria, invades Scotland and defeats King Macbeth – he of Shakespearian fame.
1862 A hurricane kills 40 000 people in Canton, China.
1890 Vincent van Gogh, 37, shoots himself and dies two days later. Although the Dutch painter is one of the most important artists in history, he was crippled with self-doubt and battled mental illness, believing himself to be a failure The fact that he only sold one painting during his lifetime, despite painting 900 over a 10-year period, seemed to confirm that to him. Despairing, he mutilated himself by cutting off his ear in 1888, then committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. His last words were: “The sadness will last forever.” He died penniless and destitute, but today hundreds of millions of people admire the beauty and vibrancy of his works, which are worth huge sums of money. Among his many profound quotes: “I put my heart and soul into my work, and I have lost my mind in the process.”
1909 The passenger ship SS Waratah, with 211 people on board, disappears off the Wild Coast, en route from Durban to Cape Town.
1913 Samuel Collins, a pioneer in off-shore diamond mining on the West Coast, is born.
1921 Researchers in Toronto, led by Frederick Banting, prove insulin regulates blood sugar.
1931 Grasshoppers in the US Midwest destroy thousands of hectares of crops.
1944 The first British jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor, is first used in combat.
1953 The undeclared Korean War ends after three years of fighting. Four million people die, among them 36 South African Air Force pilots.
1996 Terror strikes the Atlanta Olympics as a pipe bomb explodes, killing two people and injuring more than 100 others.
2002 A Sukhoi Su-27 fighter crashes during an air show at Lviv, Ukraine, killing 77 people and injuring at least 500 others, making it the deadliest air show disaster in history.
2013 The first Przewalski’s horse (whose wild populations were believed extinct in 1969) is born via artificial insemination at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute as part of an effort to rebuild the wild herds.
2019 At least 65 mourners are killed by Boko Haram militants at a funeral in Nigeria.
2021 China tests a missile with a hypersonic weapons system. It is later described as “very close” to a Sputnik moment – which was a period of public fear and anxiety during the Cold War among Western nations about a technological gap between the US and the Soviet Union.
2021 Fiji retains its Olympic Rugby Sevens title with 27-12 win over New Zealand in Tokyo; only the second gold in the country's Olympic history.
2021 The largest-ever repatriation of 17 000 looted Iraqi antiquities (stolen during the Iraq War) are returned to Baghdad, including items from well-known US institutions like the Museum of the Bible, and Cornell University
2022 A 170-carat pink diamond, the “Lulo Rose”, thought to be largest discovered in 300 years, is announced as having been found in Angola.