18 Interesting and noteworthy events from South Africa and around the world that we can relate to.
1533 England’s Henry VIII secretly marries the second of his six wives, Anne Boleyn.
1554 The city São Paulo, Brazil, is founded.
1575 Luanda, the capital of Angola, is founded by the Portuguese navigator Paulo Dias de Novais.
1905 The Cullinan diamond, the world’s largest, is found near Pretoria.
1914 An Indian mass meeting in Durban unanimously endorses the agreement between General Jan Smuts and Mahatma Gandhi regarding voluntary registration, poll tax and the recognition of Indian marriages, among others.
1918 The Ukrainian People’s Republic declares independence from Russia.
1919 The Paris Peace Conference accepts the proposal to create the League of Nations, the forerunner of the UN.
1924 The inaugural Winter Olympic Games open in Chamonix, in the French Alps.
1939 The first nuclear fission experiment (the splitting of a uranium atom) in the US takes place at Columbia University, by a team that includes Enrico Fermi, father of the atomic bomb.
1942 Thailand declares war on the US and UK.
1945 The pivotal Battle of the Bulge ends.
1947 Notorious gangster Al Capone, 48, who once controlled organised crime in Chicago, dies from syphilis in Miami.
1949 The first Emmy Awards are presented; the venue is the Hollywood Athletic Club.
1964 Blue Ribbon Sports, which would later become Nike (after the winged Greek goddess of victory), is founded by University of Oregon track and field athletes.
1981 Following a cloud burst in the hinterland, at least 100 people drown and the town is devastated when the Buffels River bursts its banks in the Karoo town of Laingsburg.
1995 Russia almost launches a nuclear attack after it mistakes a Norwegian research rocket, for an enemy attack.
2005 A stampede at the Mandhradevi temple in Maharashtra, India, kills at least 258 people.
2018 The Doomsday Clock is moved by 30 seconds to 2 minutes to midnight by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the world is 90 seconds away from apocalypse, the closest it’s been since the height of the Cold War.