To the amazement of court officials, a convicted war criminal downs a glass of poison in the dock at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. Picture: AFP
526 The likely date of the Antioch earthquake in southern Turkey that kills 200 000 people.
1775 Sir James Jay invents invisible ink.
1781 The crew of the British slave ship Zong murder 142 Africans by dumping them into the sea to claim insurance money.
1864 The Sand Creek Massacre takes place in Colorado when US Army troops slaughter at least 400 surrendered Indians.
1898 Influential British author CS Lewis is born in Belfast, Ireland. He wrote books on Christian teachings including The Pilgrim’s Regress, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and The Screwtape Letters.
1900 General Horatio Kitchener takes over command from General Lord Roberts of the British forces in South Africa.
1935 Physicist Erwin Schrödinger publishes his famous thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat, a paradox that illustrates the problem of quantum mechanics.
1941 A passenger ship, the Lurline, sends a radio signal after sighting the Japanese war fleet east of Hawaii. The warning could have averted the attack on Pearl Harbor.
1947 Palestine is partitioned into Jewish and Arab lands by the UN General Assembly, resulting in the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel the following year.
1949 Explosions at an uranium mine in East Germany kill 3 700 people.
1972 Atari releases Pong, the first commercially successful video game.
1987 North Korean agents plant a bomb on Korean Air Flight 858, killing 115 passengers and crew.
1994 Seoul, Korea, celebrates the 600th anniversary of its founding.
2017 Bosnian Croat general Slobodan Praljak commits suicide in court by drinking poison after an appeal against his 20-year prison term for war crimes is read out in The Hague.
2019 A wood fragment, supposedly from Jesus’ manger, is returned to Bethlehem after 1 400 years on the orders of Pope Francis.
2021 Lionel Messi, PSG’s Argentina forward wins an unprecedented 7th Fifa Ballon d’Or.
2022 Three stowaways are rescued by the Spanish coastguard after they had spent 11 days at sea balancing on a ships’ rudder from Nigeria to the Canary islands
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