NOW & THEN
29 JANUARY
1801: Cleopatra’s Needles rediscovered in Alexandria. One was moved to Thames Embankment in 1878, the other to Central Park, New York, in 1880.
1801: France and Spain issued ultimatum to Portugal to break allegiance to Britain.
1848: Greenwich Mean Time was adopted in Scotland.
1856: The Victoria Cross was instituted. The first medals were made of metal from guns captured from the Russians in the Crimean war.
1886: The first successful petrol-driven car, built by Karl Benz, was patented. It had three rubber-tyred wheels and went at 9.3mph. Benz crashed it into a brick wall during a demonstration.
1916: Germans staged first Zeppelin raid on Paris.
1927: Park Lane Hotel, London, opened. It was the first hotel in Britain to provide a bathroom for every bedroom.
1942: Desert Island Discs, devised and presented by Roy Plomley, started on Radio 4. Actor Vic Oliver was his first guest. Plomley died after presenting 1,791 programmes of what is still the longest-running radio series.
1949: Britain granted de facto recognition to new state of Israel.
1963: Britain was refused entry to European Common Market by France’s veto.
1975: Cost of colour television licences in Britain trebled from £6 to £18.
1985: Oxford University dons refused to grant Margaret Thatcher an honorary degree.
1988: Four seamen were reported killed in two Iraqi air attacks on shipping along Iran’s Gulf coast.
1990: Ousted East German Communist Party leader Erich Honecker arrested and ordered to stand trial for high treason.
1992: Boris Yeltsin announced further far-reaching cuts in Russia’s nuclear arsenal.
1996: President Jacques Chirac announced a “definitive end” to French nuclear weapons testing.
1996: La Fenice, Venice’s opera house, was destroyed by fire.
1998: In Birmingham, Alabama, a bomb exploded at an abortion clinic, killing one and severely wounding another. Serial bomber Eric Robert Rudolph was suspected as the culprit.
2001: Thousands of student protesters in Indonesia stormed parliament and demanded that president Abdurrahman Wahid resign due to alleged involvement in corruption scandals.
2002: In his State of the Union Address, president George W Bush described “regimes that sponsor terror” as an “Axis of Evil”, in which he included Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
2010: Former prime minister Tony Blair told the Chilcot inquiry, the public inquiry into the UK’S role in the Iraq War, that he had no regrets about supporting the United States in toppling Saddam Hussein.
2012: Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Stephen Hester decided not to accept the £963,000 shares-only bonus payment on offer to him due to “enormous political and media pressure”.