The Mercenary War, also known as the Truceless War, was a mutiny by
troops employed by Carthage at the end of the First Punic War (264 to
241 BC), backed by an uprising of African settlements against
Carthaginian control. The war began in 241 BC as a dispute over wages
owed to 20,000 foreign soldiers. It erupted into a full-scale mutiny
that included 70,000 Africans from Carthage's oppressed dependent
territories, bringing supplies and finance. The Carthaginian general
Hamilcar Barca initially demonstrated leniency to woo the rebels over,
but pursued the war with great brutality after they tortured 700
Carthaginian prisoners to death. It ended in late 238 or early 237 BC
with a Carthaginian victory. An expedition was then prepared to reoccupy
Sardinia, where all Carthaginians had been killed. However, Rome
declared that this would be an act of war and occupied both Sardinia and
Corsica, in contravention of the recent peace treaty. (This article is
part of a featured topic: Punic Wars.).
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_topics/Punic_Wars>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1934:
At least 10,700 people died when an earthquake registering
8.0 Mw struck Nepal and the Indian state of Bihar.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1934_Nepal%E2%80%93India_earthquake>
1951:
Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald and
Majdanek concentration camps, was sentenced to life imprisonment by a
West German court.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilse_Koch>
1981:
The American serial police-procedural television show Hill
Street Blues aired its pilot episode, "Hill Street Station".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_Street_Station>
1991:
Queen Elizabeth II signed letters patent instituting the
Victoria Cross for Australia; the country became the first Commonwealth
realm with a separate Victoria Cross award in its honours system.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Cross_for_Australia>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
field of vision:
The area that a person, an animal, etc., can see with its eyes (or each
eye individually) without turning the head.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/field_of_vision>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the
narrow horizons of his particular individualistic concerns to the
broader concerns of all humanity. And this is one of the big problems of
life, that so many people never quite get to the point of rising above
self. And so they end up the tragic victims of self-centeredness. They
end up the victims of distorted and disrupted personality. … These are
the people who cannot face disappointments. These are the people who
cannot face being defeated. These are the people who cannot face being
criticized. These are the people who cannot face these many experiences
of life which inevitably come because they are too centered in
themselves.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.>
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