NOW & THEN
25 JANUARY
Burns Night.
1327: Edward III ascended to the English throne.
1533: King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn were secretly married by the Bishop of Lichfield – and became the parents of the future Queen Elizabeth I of England.
1554: The city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, was founded.
1817: First issue of The Scotsman was published by its founders, Charles Maclaren, William Ritchie and John Macdiarmid.
1858: Mendelssohn’s Wedding March was first played at the wedding of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Victoria, to the crown prince of Prussia.
1881: Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell formed the Oriental Telephone Company.
1919: League of Nations was founded. Its first meeting was held a year later.
1924: Opening ceremony of the first Winter Olympics took place at Chamonix in France.
1955: Scientists at Columbia University developed an atomic clock accurate to within one second in 300 years.
1968: Great train robber Charles Wilson was captured in Montreal three years after escaping from prison.
1971: Idi Amin became president of Uganda, leading a military coup which deposed Milton Obote.
1971: Charles Manson and others were found guilty of multiple murders in the US.
1981: The Gang of Four - Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and William Rodgers - announced the Limehouse Declaration, which called for a classless crusade for social justice. They were expelled from the Labour Party for forming a Council for Social Democracy.
1986: Voyager 2, sweeping to within 51,000 miles (81,000 kilometres) of Uranus, discovered a tenth ring and a 15th moon.
1990: Forty-six people died in the worst storms in southern Britain since the hurricane of October, 1987. Gusts of up to 110 mph caused chaos on road and rail.
1991: Saddam Hussein unleashed environmental disaster when he ordered the release of millions of gallons of crude oil into the sea from a Kuwaiti storage plant.
1995: Government ministers ordered a rethink of plans to axe
most of the Anglo-scottish night trains.
2004: Opportunity rover landed on the surface of Mars.
2008: Scottish & Newcastle, Britain’s biggest brewer and maker of Newcastle Brown Ale, was bought by Carlsberg and Heineken for £7.8bn.
2011: Revolution began in Egypt, with a series of demonstrations, marches, rallies, acts of civil disobedience, riots, labour strikes and violent clashes in Cairo, Alexandria, and other cities in the country.
2012: First Minister Alex Salmond set out the question he intended to ask voters in a referendum on Scottish independence. He said Scots would be asked: “Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?” in a ballot he said would be held in 2014.