NOW & THEN
DECEMBER 4
1154: Nicholas Breakspear became the only English Pope as Adrian IV.
1586: Queen Elizabeth I confirmed death sentence against Mary Queen of Scots.
1745: Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army reached Derby during the Jacobite Uprising, the furthest point of their march south through England.
1829: Suttee, the Hindu custom of a wife being burnt with her dead husband, became illegal in India, but continues in areas like Rajasthan to the present day.
1833: British-born businessman Arthur Tappan formed the American Anti-slavery Society in Philadelphia.
1859: The colony of Queensland was established.
1872: The Mary Celeste, an American merchant ship was found adrift and abandoned with a cargo of alcohol in the Atlantic Ocean, off the Azores Islands.
1905: Prime minister Arthur Balfour resigned.
1918: Woodrow Wilson sailed to Europe for the Versailles peace conference and became the first US president to travel outside the US while in office.
1935: Monopoly was born.
1937: The Dandy comic was first published by DC Thomson in Dundee. It folded in 2012.
1952: A freak weather change saw London enveloped by a layer of smog. After five days, the death toll came to more than 4,000, and thousands more died later from related illnesses.
1954: The first Burger King outlet opened in Miami.
1961: The birth control pill became available on the National Health Service.
1978: HMS Ark Royal, the navy’s largest ship, arrived at Plymouth on her last voyage before being broken up.
1990: The Aga Khan withdrew all his race horses from Britain in protest against dope detection methods which had disqualified his filly Aliysa from winning the previous year’s Oaks.
1991: Terry Anderson, the longest-serving Western hostage in Lebanon, was set free in Beirut after seven years.
1996: A referendum in Hawick voted by 4-1 in favour of women continuing to be excluded from the town’s traditionally men-only common riding.
2007: An inquiry into the deaths of 14 servicemen in a Nimrod MR2 from Kinloss, which exploded in midair in Afghani
stan, found that it was caused by a fuel leak after air-to-air refuelling and blamed the Ministry of Defence and the RAF for failing to ensure that the aircraft was safe.
2008: Karen Matthews, the mother of nine-year-old Shannon, was convicted of her kidnapping. 2009: Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were found guilty in Italy of murdering British student Meredith Kercher in 2007. The pair were acquitted of the murder in October 2011.
2011: Giant pandas Tian Tian and Yang Guang began settling into their new home at Edinburgh Zoo after a nine-hour flight from China. They were on loan to the zoo for ten years.
2014: United Nations announced that the world was on course for the warmest year since record began.