The metre is accepted, Mussolini shrugs off attempt on his life and Hansie Cronje charged with match-fixing.

30 Good Friday: Scholars’ estimate for Jesus’ crucifixion by Roman troops in Jerusalem.

451 “The Scourge of All Lands”, Attila the Hun sacks Metz and attacks other cities in Gaul (France).

1501 Portuguese explorer João da Nova lands at Mossel Bay and leaves behind an inscribed stone.

1795 France adopts the metre as the basic measure of length.

1831 Emperor Pedro I of Brazil resigns. goes to Portugal to become King Pedro IV.

1874 Charlotte Makgomo Maxeke, teacher, social worker, politician and founder of the Bantu Women’s League of South Africa, is born in Fort Beaufort, Cape Colony.

1926 Italy’s Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini is shot at 3 times by Violet Gibson, 50, but is hit only in the nose as he walks among the crowd in Rome. His nose bandaged, he dismisses his shooting as “a mere trifle”, and continues. Almost lynched by the crowd, Gibson is arrested, then released without charge at the request of Mussolini. She is deported to Britain, where she spends the rest of her life in a mental asylum.

1933 Prohibition in the US ends (except in Oklahoma where it remains on the statute books for another 51 years).

1945 The Japanese super battleship Yamato is sunk by American aircraft.

1950 Bechuanaland nationalist leader, Seretse Khama is denied permission to see his English wife, Ruth Williams. (Julius Nyerere, the future president of Tanzania, called theirs “one of the great love stories of the world”.)

1968 Motor racing world champion Jim Clark, of Britain, is killed in an accident at Hockenheim, Germany.

1969 Symbolic birth date of the Internet.

1978 US President Jimmy Carter cancels development of the neutron bomb.

1979 Using a sophisticated arching belly flop, Henri la Mothe dives from a height of 28 foot into a foot of water and lives to tell the tale.

2000 Proteas captain Hansie Cronje is charged by Delhi police with match-fixing.

2003 US troops capture Baghdad; Saddam Hussein’s regime falls two days later.

2012 An avalanche near the Siachen Glacier buries 130 Pakistani troops. The glacier, which is in the disputed region of Kashmir in the Himalayas, is the highest battlefield on earth, but the real battle is with the inhospitable terrain. More Indian and Pakistani soldiers have died from it than from any actual hostilities between them.

2019 Rwanda marks 25 years and the beginning of 100 days of mourning since the genocide that killed 800 000 people, while UNESCO commemorates the International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in Rwanda.

2022 Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi transfers power to an eight-member council to negotiate with the Houthis in attempt to end country's seven-year civil war.

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