SEPTEMBER 11

1773 US founding father Ben Franklin writes “There never was a good war or bad peace”. 1896 Johannesburg is named after Johann Friedrich Bernhard Rissik and Christiaan Johannes Joubert.

1900 Transvaal president Paul Kruger crosses the Transvaal border on his way to Lourenço Marques (Maputo).

1900 Martial law is declared in the Transvaal. 1914 Australia invades New Britain (in New Guinea), defeating a German contingent. 1930 Sicily’s Stromboli volcano erupts and sends 2-ton rocks 3.2km high.

1944 An RAF raid on Darmstadt, Germany, causes a firestorm that kills 11 500 people. 1950 Statesman and former prime minister General Jan Christiaan Smuts, 80, dies.

2001 The September 11 attacks – a series of co-ordinated suicide attacks – kill 2 996 people, including the 19 hijackers who committed suicide/murder using four hijacked airliners. Two bring down the World Trade Center towers in New York City; a third crashes into The Pentagon near Washington; and a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania after a fightback by passengers. More than 6 000 other people are directly injured by the 9/11 attacks – the deadliest terrorist act in world history, and the most devastating foreign attack on US soil since the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. (An unknown number of people survived the initial collapse of the “twin towers”, but are buried in air pockets beneath the rubble and could not be rescued in time.) Because of the large amount of toxic dust around Ground Zero, 33 000 rescue workers are forced to seek treatment in the years to come for long-term health problems – many fatal. The attacks spawn America’s longest war, which only ends on August 31, 2021, when US forces withdraw from Afghanistan.

2012 Fires at clothing factories in Pakistan kill 315 people.

2015 A crane falls on to a mosque in Saudi Arabia, killing 111 people and injuring 394. 2019 Water is detected for the first time on a planet outside our solar system, on exoplanet K2-18b, 110 light-years away, in findings published in Nature Astronomy.

| THE HISTORIAN