We are free!
711 The Moors begin their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal).
1521 Explorer Ferdinand Magellan is killed in the Philippines.
1667 Blind and impoverished, John Milton sells the copyright of famous poem, Paradise Lost for £10, which back then was a lot of money.
1810 Ludwig van Beethoven composes Für Elise.
1865 The paddle-steamer SS Sultana explodes on the Mississippi River, killing 1 800 of its 2 427 passengers.
1905 William Ayliff (79), farmer and Cape politician, dies in Grahamstown. The Eastern Cape town of Mt Ayliff is named after him.
1943 Polish resistance fighter Witold Pilecki escapes from the death camp Auschwitz after having voluntarily gone there to investigate the Holocaust.
1950 The notorious Group Areas Act is passed, formally segregating races.
1953 The US’s Operation Moolah offers huge cash rewards to any pilot who defects to South Korea with a MiG-15.
1956 Heavyweight boxing champ, Rocky Marciano, retires undefeated after 49 bouts, 49 wins – 43 by knock-out.
1986 Soviet authorities order the evacuation of the city of Pripyat, a day after the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
1987 Austrian President Kurt Waldheim (a former UN secretary-general) and his wife are barred from the US because of alleged war-crimes.
1989 Protesting students in Beijing take over the city’s Tiananmen Square.
1993 The entire Zambia national football team dies in a plane crash.
1994 Watershed in South Africa’s history as the first free and fair elections extend into a second day of voting. This day is forever remembered as the public holiday, Freedom Day, when the country broke free of the shackles of Apartheid.
2005 The Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger aircraft, has its maiden test flight.
2018 At a historic summit, the leaders of the two Koreas – the North’s Kim Jong-un and the South’s Moon Jae-in – agree to officially end Korean war and rid peninsula of nuclear weapons.