A selection of significant and interesting snippets of news, with a South African angle, on this day over the ages
1325 Ibn Battuta, 21, leaves Tangiers for Mecca. Instead of 16 months, he is gone 24 years, marries several times, does the Hajj repeatedly, and his wander-lust takes him to most of the Islamic world as well as many non-Muslim lands. He gives us the first mention of China’s Great Wall.
1525 Rather than stay celibate like all clergy were required, rebel German priest and reformer Martin Luther marries.
1838 Andries Potgieter gets all the land between the Vet and Vaal rivers from Bataung captain Makwana for cattle.
1900 German minister to China, Baron von Kettler beats two young Boxers, members of a secret society called the Yihetuan (Righteous and Harmonious Fists). This group practised a form of martial arts that resembled boxing, at least to Western eyes. The 'Boxers', as they became known, embarked on an armed campaign to drive all foreigners out of China, and the beating by Von Kettler led to riots and furthered the cause of the Boxer Rebellion.
1920 The US Post Office bans children from being sent by parcel post.
1922 The longest recorded attack of hiccups begins: Charlie Osborne hiccups for 68 years.
1942 Desert battles claim 230 British tanks.
1944 German tank commander Michael Wittmann destroys 14 British tanks, 15 personnel carriers and two anti-tank guns in the space of 15 minutes.
1950 Parliament adopts the Groups Area Act, which would cause much hardship.
1961 Rand Daily Mail reporter Benjamin Pogrund is jailed for refusing to divulge the source of his story, which was actually was a hoax the government believed.
1964 Nelson Mandela arrives on Robben Island to begin his life sentence.
1978 The popular movie Grease, starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, opens.
1983 Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the Solar System.
2000 Italy pardons Mehmet Ali Ağca, the gunman who tried to kill the pope in 1981.
2005 South Africa’s Nuno Gomes sets a world record for the deepest free dive, 318.25m in the Red Sea.
2012 Bombings across Iraq kill at least 93.
2015 Floods in Tbilisi, Georgia, kill 12 people and free animals from the city's zoo, including bears and hippos, to roam the city.
2018 Antarctica is melting at an accelerating rate – 200 billion tons a year, or 3 trillion tons in 25 years, says the journal Nature.
2018 Volkswagen is fined €1 billion by German prosecutors for lying about emissions from its diesel vehicles, saying they were lower than they actually were.
2018 A raccoon climbs a 23-story office building in St Paul, Minnesota, becoming an internet sensation.
2022 A Google engineer claims one of its AI systems, Lamda, might have a sentient mind, causing the company to place him on leave.
2022 The world's largest-known freshwater fish, a stingray 3.98m x 2.2m, is caught in the Mekong river, Cambodia (tagged and released).