1838 Alfred Vail and colleagues demonstrate a telegraph system using dots and dashes – it is the forerunner of Morse Code.
1842 About 4 500 British and Indian troops leave Kabul (present-day Afghanistan), but are massacred by tribesmen before reaching India.
1900 Having already besieged the fortress at Ladysmith, Boer forces attack it, but are driven back with heavy losses by British defenders.
1907 Maria Montessori opens a school and day-care centre for working-class children in Rome. Her methods of teaching are implemented worldwide and survive to this day, including in South Africa.
1929 Mother Teresa arrives in Calcutta to begin her work among India’s poorest.
1958 The prestigious Bollingen Prize for poetry is awarded to e.e. cummings – one of the greatest lyric poets of the English language. Much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax and uses lower case spellings for poetic expression.
1995 Joe Slovo, the communist intellectual widely credited with being one of the masterminds of South Africa’s national reconciliation, dies of cancer.
1995 A chemical fire in a block of flats in Manila, Philippines draws police attention to the area and the discovery of plans for Project Bojinka, an al-Qaeda 3-phase mass terrorist attack, which involved assassinating Pope John Paul II, blowing up 11 airliners in flight from Asia to the US with the goal of shutting down air travel around the world, and crashing a plane into the headquarters of the CIA.
2000 The last Pyrenean ibex is found dead after being crushed by a tree.
2017 Five die and six people are injured in a mass shooting at an airport in Florida, US.
2019 About 40 people are killed in a gold mine collapse in northern Afghanistan.
2021 Supporters of President Donald Trump storm the US Capitol in Washington during the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s win, resulting in five deaths and the evacuation of lawmakers.
2022 Tennis world No. 1 Novak Djokovic’s visa into Australia is cancelled after an uproar over his Covid-19 vaccination exemption, forcing him to withdraw from the Australian Open tennis tournament. | The Historian