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Grave of the British soldiers killed at Bronkhorstspruit

The battle of Bronkhorstspruit was the first major engagement of the First Boer War. It took place by the Bronkhorstspruit river near Bronkhorstspruit in Transvaal on 20 December 1880. Threatened by the growing numbers of militant Boers in the Pretoria region, the British recalled the 94th Regiment of Foot, which had several companies garrisoned in towns and villages across the wider area. The regiment's commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Philip Robert Anstruther, led a 34-wagon column on a 188-mile (303 km) journey from Lydenburg to Pretoria. A Boer commando force, led by Francois Gerhardus Joubert, was ordered to stop the British. Anstruther's column was confronted by the Boers, who demanded that the British stop their march. Anstruther refused, and the Boers attacked. The British took heavy casualties and surrendered after about 15 minutes; their surviving men were captured. Anstruther was badly wounded and died of his injuries a few days later. (Full article...)

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Sky lanterns during the Yi Peng festival

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In the news

Fatafehi Fakafānua

Fatafehi Fakafānua (pictured) is elected prime minister by the legislative assembly of Tonga.
Filmmaker and actor Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, are found stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home.
José Antonio Kast is elected president of Chile.
Sixteen people, including a gunman, are killed in a mass shooting attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney.

On this day

December 20

MV Doña Paz in port, 1984

1248 – Attempting to form an alliance with the Mongol Empire, Louis IX of France met with two of their envoys while en route to the Seventh Crusade.
1984 – Twelve-year-old Jonelle Matthews disappeared from her home in Greeley, Colorado; her body was not discovered until 2019.
1987 – The deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in history occurred when the MV Doña Paz (pictured) sank after colliding with an oil tanker in the Tablas Strait in the Philippines, resulting in an estimated 4,385 deaths.
1995 – American Airlines Flight 965 crashed into a mountain in Buga, Colombia, killing most of those on board.
2007 – Pablo Picasso's Portrait of Suzanne Bloch was stolen from the São Paulo Museum of Art before being recovered about three weeks later.

Pope Zephyrinus (d. 217)
Richard Boyle, 2nd Viscount Shannon (d. 1740)
Maya Lindholm (b. 1990)
Dawn Steel (d. 1997)

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Today's featured picture

The Shah Jahan Mosque is a 17th-century central mosque in the city of Thatta, Pakistan. The mosque was built during the reign of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, who bestowed it on Thatta as a token of gratitude, and is heavily influenced by Central Asian architecture – a reflection of Shah Jahan's campaigns near Samarkand shortly before the mosque was designed. It is notable for its geometric brickwork, a decorative element that is unusual for Mughal-period mosques. The mosque is unusual for its lack of minarets although it has a total of 93 domes, the most of any structure in Pakistan. This photograph depicts an interior view of one of the Shah Jahan Mosque's larger domes, showing its blue-and-white tiles arranged in stellated patterns to represent the heavens.

Photograph credit: Alexander Savin

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