Our collection of 1995 news articles offer coverage of events such as the announcement of the first DVD, the Great Hanshin earthquake in Japan, and the success of South Africa in the 1995 rugby world cup. It was also during this year that O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of double murder, and French woman Jeanne Calment reached 120 years of age to become the oldest person the world has ever seen. Read about these 1995 headlines and much more in an authentic 1995 newspaper chronicling the years most captivating events as they happened, through first hand accounts and original photographs.
| Date | Event |
|---|
| 1st January 1995 | Austria, Finland and Sweden enter the European Union. |
| 17th January 1995 | The Great Hanshin Earthquake, measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale, occurs near Kobe in Japan and kills 6,434 people. |
| 15th February 1995 | A football match held in Dublin between Republic of Ireland and England is abandoned due to violence and rioting. |
| 26th February 1995 | The United Kingdom's oldest investment banking firm, Barings Bank, collapses after securities broker Nick Leeson loses $1.4 billion by speculating on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. |
| 24th March 1995 | For the first time in twenty-six years, no British soldiers patrol the streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland. |
| 7th May 1995 | Jacques Chirac is elected president of France. |
| 24th May 1995 | Harold Wilson, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1916) dies. |
| 28th May 1995 | An earthquake in Neftegorsk, Russia, measures 7.6 on the Richter scale and kills at least 2,000 people. |
| 24th June 1995 | South Africa wins the 1995 Rugby World Cup. |
| 4th July 1995 | Prime Minister John Major wins his battle to remain leader of the Conservative Party. |
| 6th August 1995 | Hundreds of people in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Washington D.C. and Tokyo mark the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb. |
| 1st September 1995 | The DVD, an optical disc computer storage media format, is announced. |
| 4th September 1995 | ‘eBay’ is founded. |
| 3rd October 1995 | O.J. Simpson is found not guilty of double murder for the deaths of former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. |
| 17th October 1995 | French woman Jeanne Calment reaches the confirmed age of 120 years and 238 days, making her the oldest person ever recorded. |
| 22nd November 1995 | Rosemary West is sentenced to life in prison for killing ten women and girls, including her daughter and stepdaughter, after the jury returns a guilty verdict at Winchester Crown Court. The trial judge recommends that West should never be released from prison, making her only the second woman after Myra Hindley in British legal history to be subjected to a whole life tariff. |
| 15th December 1995 | The European Court of Justice rules that all EU football players have the right to a free transfer among member states at the end of their contracts. |
| 30th December 1995 | The lowest ever United Kingdom temperature of -27.2°C is recorded at Altnaharra in the Scottish Highlands. This equals the record set at Braemar, Aberdeenshire, in 1895 and 1982. |