The Sussexes rock Britain’s royal family with damning allegations, a new record for Covid-19 deaths, South African war hero killed and brazen poachers strike at a Paris zoo. These are some of the things that went down on this day, back in the day
321 Roman Emperor Constantine I decrees that the dies Solis Invicti (sun-day) is the day on which the empire will take a rest from normal activities.
1876 Alexander Graham Bell is granted a patent for an invention he calls the ‘telephone’.
1902 General Koos de la Rey defeats and captures General Methuen and 870 soldiers in the Battle of Tweebosch, in the Western Transvaal. It was the last important battle won by the Boer forces and also the biggest defeat suffered by the British in the Anglo-Boer War.
1941 Günther Prien and the crew of German submarine U-47, one of the most successful U-boats of World War II, disappear at sea without a trace.
1945 At Woeste Hoeve, near Apeldoorn in the Netherlands, German occupiers execute 250 of the hamlet’s inhabitants after the Dutch resistance kill the Nazi chief of police.
1951 UN troops led by General Matthew Ridgway begin Operation Ripper – an assault against Chinese forces during the Korean War.
1952 Decorated South African World War II hero Job Masego, who, almost single-handedly sank a German supply boat while a prisoner of war, dies in Springs, Gauteng, after being hit by a train. A street and a school in Kwa Thema and a naval vessel were named in his honour.
1994 Nelson Mandela rejects demands by white right-wingers for a separate homeland.
1998 Eastern Province Springbok prop Frans ‘Domkrag’ Erasmus, 38, is killed in a car accident, 100m from the place where his wife was killed in an accident a month before.
2004 Zimbabwe seizes a plane full of 64 mercenaries and military equipment. Simon Mann, of the mercenary outfit Executive Outcomes, is arrested along with five others on the tarmac, after the Zimbabwean authorities had been tipped off by the South African government.
2016 Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova reveals she failed a drugs test for meldonium at the Australian Open in January. She is suspended from the game for 15 months.
Malta’s picturesque Azure Window, used in the pilot episode of Game of Thrones (where Daenerys Targaryen marries Khal Drogo) collapses after a storm.
2017 Poachers strike a zoo, west of Paris, for the first time in history killing a four-year-old White rhino for its horn.
2021 Explosions at a military base in Bata, Equatorial Guinea, likely from faulty storage of dynamite, kills at least 98 and injures over 400.
2021 Oprah Winfrey interviews with Britain’s Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. The interview on US prime time broadcast is filled with explosive and sensation claims that rock the royal monarchy, with Meghan claiming she was made suicidal and subject to racist treatment by Buckingham Palace.
2022 The global death toll from Covid-19 passes 6 million according to America research facility, Johns Hopkins University, with 57% of the world's population fully vaccinated.