NOW & THEN
24 AUGUST
1572: The St Bartholomew’s Day massacre took place in Paris when thousands of French Huguenots were killed by order of the Catholic French court.
1814: The Capitol and the White House in Washington were burned by British troops under General Ross.
1847: Charlotte Bronte completed the manuscript for Jane Eyre.
1875: Matthew Webb, Merchant Navy captain, became the first person to swim the English Channel.
1891: The motion picture camera was patented by Thomas Edison.
1921: Sixty-two people died when an ZR-2 dirigible balloon exploded near Hull.
1932: Amelia Earhart made the first transcontinental non-stop flight by a woman, from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey.
1949: The treaty which created the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation came into effect.
1957: Seventeen-year-old Jimmy Greaves scored on his debut for Chelsea in a 1-1 draw with Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane.
1965: The 450,000-year-old body of a man was found in a Hungarian limestone quarry.
1968: France exploded a hydrogen bomb at South Pacific testing ground and became world’s fifth thermonuclear power.
1973: Garry Sobers of West Indies scored his 26th and last Test century – 150 against England at Lord’s.
1981: Mark Chapman was sentenced to 20 years to life for the murder of John Lennon.
1989: Voyager 2 discovered two more moons around Neptune, bringing the total to eight.
1990: Irish hostage Brian Keenan was freed in Beirut after more than four years of captivity.
1994: Initial accord agreed between Israel and the PLO about partial self-rule of the Palestinians on the West Bank.
1995: Computer software developer Microsoft released its Windows 95 operating system.
1998: The Netherlands chosen as the venue for the trial of two Libyan suspects accused of the 1998 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 which crashed at Lockerbie.
2004: Eighty-nine passengers died when two airliners exploded after flying out of Domodedovo International Airport, near Moscow. The explosions were caused by suicide bombers from Chechnya.
2006: The International Astronomical Union redefined the term “planet” such that Pluto was to be considered a Dwarf Planet.
2008: Sixty-eight people were killed when a Boeing 737 crashed in a ball of flames shortly after take-off from Kyrgyzstan’s main airport.
2012: A Norwegian court found that mass killer Anders Behring Breivik was sane and sentenced him to 21 years in jail. Breivik admitted killing 77 people and wounding more than 240 others when he bombed central Oslo and then opened fire at an island youth camp last year.
2014: Nurse William Pooley flew back to UK for emergency treatment after contracting the ebola virus while treating patients in Sierra Leone.