3 days ago
On this day, June 30: A South African hero, all the astronauts are dead, and comedian Bill Cosby's unfunny sentence overturned
1559 King Henry II of France is suffers a head wound while jousting. He dies 10 days later.
1859 French acrobat Charles Blondin crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope.
1908 An explosion, thought to be from an asteroid or a comet glancing off Earth's atmosphere, flattens 80 million trees over an area of 2 150 square kilometers, in a sparsely populated region of Siberia, Russia. It is the largest impact event in recorded history, although there have been several bigger ones in prehistoric history.
1941 South African Chief Petty Officer René Sethren mans a machine gun in place of its fallen gunner and sends up a hail of bullets at attacking German aircraft. Shot 8 times, he refuses to leave his post until the attack is over and is treated for 27 wounds. His he was remembered in the renaming of a Warrior-class strike craft, SAS Rene Sethren, which during apartheid was the SAS Oswald Pirow.
1971 The crew of the Russian space mission Soyuz 11 is found dead upon its return to earth – they are the only people to die in space.
1991 The 1913 Native Land Act, an important component of apartheid, is repealed.
1997 In Hong Kong, the flag of the British Crown Colony is lowered at midnight as their 99-year lease from China expires.
2013 Nineteen firemen die in a fire in Arizona.
2021 A heat wave kills 100 people in Canada. By its end on August 12, 595 have died from it.
2020 Barcelona's Argentine soccer superstar Lionel Messi scores his 700th career goal.
2021 The Pennsylvania Supreme overturns comedian Bill Cosby's sexual assault conviction, ruling that the prosecutor who brought the case was bound by his predecessor's agreement not to charge Cosby in return for testimony in a related civil suit.
2022 New York is named world's wealthiest city, home to 345 600 millionaires, and 59 billionaires, with Tokyo and San Francisco making up the top three. As of this year, South Africa has seven dollar billionaires and 37 400 dollar millionaires (down from 48 700 in 2013).
2023 Vienna Austria based newspaper Wiener Zeitung final print edition headline reads '320 years, 12 presidents, 10 emperors, 2 republics, 1 newspaper' as they go completely online.
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