On This Day: Seven astronauts died when the space shuttle Challenger exploded after liftoff in 1986
On January 28, 1939, Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats died. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. On the same date in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded, resulting in the death of seven astronauts. In 1997, police confessed to the murder of black civil rights leader Steve Biko at South Africa’s Truth Commission. Japan’s Finance Minister Hiroshi Mitsuzuka was forced to resign due to a bribery case in 1998. Astrid Lindgren, the Swedish children’s author and creator of Pippi Longstocking, passed away in 2002. A Boeing 727 belonging to Ecuadorean carrier TAME crashed into Colombia’s Cumbal volcano in 2002, killing all on board. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s right-wing Likud party won a general election in 2003. Archbishop Christodoulos, the head of Greece’s Orthodox Church, died in 2008. In 2009, President Raul Castro made the first visit to Russia by a Cuban leader since the end of the Cold War. Nelson Mandela returned home from the hospital in 2011. The World Health Organization announced an outbreak of the Zika Virus in 2016.