Some of the more interesting things that happened on this day.
1146 European leaders outlaw the crossbow, hoping it will end war for all time.
1882 The Times of London pays tribute to the late King Sekhukhune of the Marota (Bapedi) Empire, calling him ‘courageous and brave’.
1900 The last 2 000 British prisoners of the Boers, held in Nooitgedagt, are freed.
1910 Royal Air Force pilot Roger Joyce Bushell is born in Springs, Transvaal. The Squadron Leader of 92 Squadron, Bushell was shot down and crash-landed on German-occupied territory in 1940. Captured, he was sent to the Dulag Luft transit camp as a prisoner of war. He tried to escape from the camp three times. On his second attempt, he managed to elude the authorities for eight months. A charismatic personality, and warm and friendly by nature, Bushell was a natural leader and a bold organisational genius with a knack of making tough decisions in an instant, and so it is no small wonder that he went on to mastermind the largest and most extravagant escape of prisoners of war ever attempted, the Great Escape. He is murdered on Hitler’s orders.
1963 A hotline communication link between the Pentagon in Washington, DC and the Kremlin in Moscow is installed. Often known as the ‘red telephone’, no phones were ever used, relying instead on Teletype equipment, fax machines and, more recently, email.
1974 An express train runs full-speed into a rail yard in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, 153 people die.
1988 SA troops withdraw from Angola.
2004 The number of people who discovered they were fraudulently married has risen to 779, says the Department of Home Affairs.
2015 Best-selling English author Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal) says he worked for spy agency MI6 for more than 20 years.
2020 Global cases of Covid-19 pass 25 million, with the world-wide death toll at 843 000.
2021 Amid chaotic scenes, America ends 20-year war in Afghanistan (the US’s longest) as the last military evacuation plane flies out of Kabul.
2021 Algeria becomes the last country to stop selling leaded petrol.
2021 China restricts online gaming for under 18s to one hour on Fridays, weekends and holidays, ordering companies to enforce this.
2022 Ukraine begins a counter-attack against invading Russian forces in the southern Kherson region.