What’s Happening Today?

International Day for Biological Diversity. It is a United nations-sanctioned international day for the promotion of biodiversity issues. The topic of biodiversity concerns stakeholders in sustainable agriculture, desertification, land degradation and drought, water and sanitation, health and sustainable development, energy, science, technology and innovation, knowledge sharing and capacity building, urban resilience and adaptation, sustainable transport, climate change and disaster risk reduction, oceans and seas, forests, vulnerable groups including indigenous peoples and food security.

Sherlock Holmes Day. Today, we celebrate this super-detective because it is also the anniversary of the birth of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

The character of Sherlock Holmes was originally inspired by Joseph Bell, a surgeon at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh for whom Doyle had worked as an assistant. Like Holmes, Bell was famous for his ability to draw broad conclusions from minute observations.

What Happened Today?

1. In 1957, South Africa’s government approved racial segregation in universities. This was one in a string of apartheid measures instituted by the government from 1948 until the early 1990s when it was abolished after an agreement between F. W. de Klerk, the then South African president and Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress.

2. In 1960, the Great Chilean Earthquake, which is the most powerful earthquake ever recorded, hit Southern Chile. The 9.5 magnitude earthquake caused giant waves at a distance of more than 10,000 kilometres away from its epicentre, with its effects being felt in faraway areas like Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Estimates of deaths from the earthquake are around 7,000 while the monetary cost is estimated to have been 3.46 billion dollars (current value).

3. In 2017, 22 people were killed at an Ariana Grande concert in the Manchester Arena. Salman Ramadan Abedi, an Islamist extremist suicide bomber detonated a shrapnel-laden homemade bomb as people were leaving the venue after the concert. Ariana Grande later hosted a benefit concert titled “Manchester One Love”, which raised more than 17 million pounds.