JANUARY 25

1533 England’s Henry VIII secretly marries the second of his six wives, Anne Boleyn.

1554 The city São Paulo, Brazil, is founded. 1575 Luanda, the capital of Angola, is founded by the Portuguese navigator Paulo Dias de Novais.

1905 The Cullinan diamond, the world’s largest, is found near Pretoria.

1914 An Indian mass meeting in Durban unanimously endorses the agreement between General Jan Smuts and Mahatma Gandhi regarding voluntary registration, poll tax and recognition of Indian marriages and other matters.

1918 The Ukrainian People’s Republic declares independence from Bolshevik Russia.

1919 The Paris Peace Conference accepts the proposal to create the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations.

1924 The Winter Olympics opens in Chamonix, in the French Alps, inaugurating the Winter Olympic Games.

1939 The first nuclear fission experiment (the splitting of a uranium atom) in the US takes place in the basement of Pupin Hall, Columbia University, by a team that included Enrico Fermi, the father of the atomic bomb.

1942 Thailand declares war on the US and UK.

1945 The pivotal Battle of the Bulge ends.

1947 Notorious gangster Al Capone, 48, who once controlled organised crime in Chicago, dies from syphilis in Miami.

1949 The first Emmy Awards are presented; the venue is the Hollywood Athletic Club. 1964 Blue Ribbon Sports, which would later become Nike, is founded by University of Oregon track and field athletes.

1971 Major-General Idi Amin leads a coup deposing President Milton Obote while he is at a Commonwealth meeting in Singapore. (This is a pre-emptive strike since Obote had arranged for Amin to be arrested and replaced as chief of staff.)

1981 Following a cloud burst in the hinterland, at least 100 people drown and the town is devastated when the Buffels River bursts its banks in the Karoo town of Laingsburg.

1995 Russia almost launches a nuclear attack after it mistakes a Norwegian research rocket for an enemy attack. President Boris Yeltsin was minutes from pressing the button when the mistake was realised and nuclear holocaust averted.

2005 A stampede at the Mandhradevi temple in Maharashtra, India, kills at least 258 people. 2018 The Doomsday Clock is moved by 30 seconds to 2 minutes to midnight by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – the closest it’s been since 1950s.