Civil War pointers; Zimbabwe beat Australia; Madiba records executions; carnage at wedding; and, near-death by chocolate
AD 68 Roman Emperor Nero commits suicide, imploring his secretary Epaphroditos to slit his throat so that he can evade death by flogging
1667 The Raid on the Medway by the Dutch fleet begins. It lasts for five days and ends in the Royal Navy’s worst defeat.
1752 The French army surrenders to British forces in Trichinopoly, India.
1862 Confederate General Stonewall Jackson concludes his successful Shenandoah Valley Campaign with victory in the Battle of Port Republic; his tactics during the American Civil War campaign are studied by militaries around the world.
1910 A passenger on the SS Arawatta throws a bottle with a note in it overboard somewhere between Cairns and Brisbane. It was found – almost to the day – 73 years later, on June 6, 1983, on Moreton Island, off Queensland. Most bottles set adrift are used, even up to quite recently, to study ocean currents. There have been some amazing paths followed by sea-bottle messages. Three that were dropped into the Beaufort Sea, above northern Alaska and north-western Canada, became frozen in sea ice. Five years later, melting Arctic ice flushed the bottles all the way to northern Europe. Another circled Antarctica one and a half times before it wound up on a beach in Tasmania.
1928 Charles Kingsford Smith completes the first trans-Pacific flight, in a Fokker Trimotor.
1941 An ammunition plant in Belgrade explodes; killing 1 500 people.
1944 German troops hang 99 civilians from lampposts and balconies in Tulle, France, in reprisal for rebel attacks leading up to D-Day.
1967 Israel captures the Golan Heights from Syria and also reaches the Suez Canal.
1983 Zimbabwe win their first cricket ODI, improbably against Australia.
1984 Nelson Mandela notes in his prison calendar the execution of Simon Mogoerane, Jerry Mosololi and Thabo Motaung.
1999 Yugoslavia and Nato sign a peace treaty ending the Kosovo War.
2010 40 people die in a suicide bombing at a wedding in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
2021 A record price for a coin sold at auction is set when a 1933 ‘Double Eagle’ gold coin sells for $18.9m in New York.
2022 Two people are rescued after falling into a tank of chocolate at a sweets factory in Pennsylvania.