Tag Archives: history

Ikitsuki, Japan | AFP | Japanese rice farmer Masatsugu Tanimoto doesn’t think of himself as a Christian, and you’d almost never find him in a church. But every so often, he and others meet to recite prayers drawn from another time and place. The group, dressed in sober kimonos and …

Pretoria, South Africa | AFP | After 52 years, Mncedisi Tyopo finally stood beside his father’s grave, looking down at remains being exhumed as part of South Africa’s attempts to come to terms with its painful past. Tyopo’s father Bhonase Vulindlela was an anti-apartheid fighter who was hanged along with …

Miami, United States | AFP | John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, but for a solid hour of that journey, NASA feared he was about to die in a blazing fireball. In fact, all of the original crew of astronauts, known as the Mercury …

COMMENT: By Kavuma-Kaggwa  Remembering Abu Mayanja, a great man of our time One of Uganda’s great men and freedom fighters, Abubakar Kakyama Mayanja, died on November 4, 2005 at Mulago Hospital after a short illness. He was buried on November 5, 2005, at his ancestral home in Zziba village, Ngogwe …

Jérusalem, Undefined | AFP | Preservation experts have opened for the first time in at least two centuries what Christians believe is Jesus’s tomb inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Some of the historic work was witnessed by AFP photographer Gali Tibbon who captured images of the …

Paris, France | AFP | A labelling error and reckless media hype in the 1980s led to unjustly branding a gay airline employee as “Patient Zero” in the US AIDS epidemic, scientific and historical sleuthing detailed Wednesday. The deadly virus, which has claimed more than 650,000 lives in the United …

Vienna, Austria | AFP |  The house in Austria where Adolf Hitler was born is to be torn down to stop it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine, authorities said Monday after years of bitter legal wrangling. “The Hitler house will be torn down. The foundations can remain but a new …

 Since 1962, we have seen history repeating itself This October 9, Uganda celebrated 54 years of Independence. It is a good point to look back and ponder what 2016 has in store for Ugandans. Looking at our nation’s history since Independence from the British colonialists in 1962 shows that years with …

Manila, Philippines | AFP | Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte does not want to be branded another Hitler but he is willing to kill three million people in his crime war, his spokesman said Saturday. Duterte has faced international condemnation after on Friday likening his anti-drugs crackdown, which has left more …

Wellington, New Zealand | AFP |  New Zealand researchers said Monday they have restored the first recording of computer-generated music, created in 1951 on a gigantic contraption built by British genius Alan Turing. The aural artefact, which paved the way for everything from synthesizers to modern electronica, opens with a …