Thomas Cranmer was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1556. The Napoleonic Code became French civil law in 1804. An earthquake shook Tokyo in 1857, leaving more than 100,000 dead. On their third attempt, 3,200 civil rights marchers succeeded in marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. And in 1970, Yugoslavian ski jumper Vinko Bogotaj crashed on a jump at the Ski-flying World Championships in Oberstdorf, West Germany. Film of the crash became a fixture of American pop culture as it was used in the opening sequence of a programme called The Wide World of Sports for over twenty years, to illustrate "
the agony of defeat".
Born today: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881), Brian Clough (1935-2004), and Gary Oldman (1958).
It is Independence Day in Namibia.
