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On June 9 in history: Rescued from drowning in a chocolate vat, and message in a bottle found after 73 years
Imaging drowning in chocolate? The reality is far worse that it might at first sound.
AD 68 Roman Emperor Nero commits suicide, begging his secretary Epaphroditos to slit his throat to escape death by flogging.
1910 A passenger on the SS Arawatta throws a bottle with a note in it overboard somewhere between Cairns and Brisbane. It was found – almost to the day – 73 years later, on June 6, 1983, on Moreton Island, Queensland. Most bottles set adrift are used, even up to quite recently, to study ocean currents. There have been some amazing paths followed by sea-bottle messages. Three that were dropped into the Beaufort Sea, above northern Alaska and north-western Canada, became frozen in sea ice. Five years later, melting Arctic ice flushed the bottles all the way to northern Europe. Another circled Antarctica one and a half times before it wound up on a beach in Tasmania.
1928 Charles Kingsford Smith completes the first trans-Pacific flight, in a Fokker Trimotor.
1941 An ammunition plant in Belgrade explodes; killing 1 500 people.
1944 German troops hang 99 civilians from lampposts and balconies in Tulle, France, in reprisals for rebel attacks leading up to D-Day.
1967 Israel captures the Golan Heights from Syria and also reaches the Suez Canal.
1983 Zimbabwe win their first cricket ODI, improbably against high-riding Australia.
1984 Nelson Mandela notes in his prison calendar the execution of Struggle heroes Simon Mogoerane, Jerry Mosololi and Thabo Motaung.
1999 Yugoslavia and Nato sign a peace treaty ending the brutal Kosovo War.
2010 40 people die in a suicide bombing at a wedding in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
2021 A record price for a coin sold at auction is set when a 1933 'Double Eagle' gold coin sells for $18.9m in New York.
2022 Conjoined twins with a fused brain successfully separated with help of virtual reality in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
2022 Two people are rescued after falling into a tank of chocolate at Mars M&M factory in Pennsylvania.
2023 Four Colombian children are found safe after surviving 40 days in the Colombian jungle after their plane crashed killing the three adults on board.
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