Major earthquake in Sicily
On December 28, 1908, a powerful earthquake occurred in Sicily. The main victim of the disaster was the city of Messina. The city of Reggio Calabria and surrounding villages were also seriously affected.
It is noteworthy that this earthquake was not among the strongest.
The tremors, the strength of which reached 7.5 points on the Richter scale, claimed the lives of more than 75 thousand people.
The earthquake in Messina was so great because the tremor occurred directly under the city. Fortunately for the surviving residents, there was a Russian warship in the near raid, whose team organized a rescue operation in the disaster zone. Russian sailors, whom many here later called “Angels from the Sea”, participated in the aftermath of the earthquake and helped save thousands of residents.
In 2012, a monument to the Russian sailors who participated in this rescue operation was unveiled in Messina.
A320 crash in Java Sea
A major plane crash occurred on December 28, 2014. The Indonesia AirAsia Airbus A320-216 airliner was operating a regular passenger flight QZ8501 on the Surabaya—Singapore route. 43 minutes after takeoff , he crashed into The Java Sea near the coast of Kalimantan Island. The wreckage of the plane was discovered only 2 days after the crash. All 162 people on board were killed: 155 passengers and 7 crew members.
This is the second largest plane crash in the history of Indonesia in terms of the number of victims (after the A300 disaster near Medan, where 234 people died).
Linus Torvalds
On December 28, 1969, Linus Benedict Torvalds, a Finnish-American programmer and creator of the Linux operating system, was born in Helsinki.
Modern Linux has become a multi-faceted OS that has filled various niches from home use to server use, and running on millions of industrial and mobile devices.
In a modern implementation, only about two percent of the Linux kernel is written by Torvalds himself. Despite the fact that he is the owner of the Linux trademark, Linus Torvalds’ project has been living an independent life for a long time.