25 August

On 25 August 1960, the 17th Olympic Summer Games opened in Rome (the Winter Olympics were then still held in the same year as the Summer Olympics and the 1960 games were at Squaw Valley, US, during February). It was the last Olympics in which South Africa competed while under the Apartheid regime - and also the Olympics in which, among others, Cassius Clay, AKA Muhammad Ali, won boxing's light-heavyweight gold medal.

In 1981 the Voyager 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to Saturn (100 000 km) and on the same day,  Mark Chapman, John Lennon's murderer, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.  Many, many years earlier (1330) AntiPope Nicolaas V overthrew himself - which was almost a millenium after the Council of Nicaea (325) adopted the Nicene Creed establishing the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

Birthdays today include authors Frederick Forsyth and Martin Amis, Actor Sean Connery and Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible), 1st tsar of Russia.

The two Voyager space probes were launched in 1977 (Voyager 2 on 20 August,  Voyager 1 on 5 September.  But Voyager 1  reached both Jupiter and Saturn sooner, as it was launched in a shorter  trajectory.  Each bears a gold-plated audio-visual disc in the event that it is ever found by intelligent life forms elsewhere in the Universe.  They include e.g. the sounds of whales, a baby crying, waves breaking on a shore, and a variety of music clips.