Today in history
1307 - King Edward I of England dies on his way north to subdue a rebellion in Scotland. He is succeeded by Edward II.
1718 - Alexis, heir to Russia’s Peter the Great, is murdered at the instigation of his father.
1753 - Act is passed for naturalisation of Jews in England.
1801 - General Toussaint l’ouverture proclaims Haiti’s independence from France.
1807 - The first of the Treaties of Tilsit is signed, under which France and Russia become allies and divide Europe between them.
1815 - Allied forces enter Paris, following Napoleon Bonaparte’s abdication.
1865 - Four people are hanged after being convicted of conspiring with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate United States President Abraham Lincoln.
1883 - Pinocchio, written by Carlo Lorenzini under his pen name of Collodi, is published for the first time.
1930 - Death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, British novelist and creator of Sherlock Holmes.
1946 - Future US President Jimmy Carter, 21, marries Rosalynn Smith, 18, in Georgia.
1997 - Britain’s House of Lords backs a bill to give princesses equal rights with princes in succession to the throne.
1997 - The Pathfinder spacecraft yields what scientists say is unmistakable photographic evidence that floods scoured the Red Planet’s landscape more than a billion years ago.
1999 - In a huge defeat for the US tobacco industry, a Florida jury finds that smoking causes a number of diseases and that the industry hides the dangers of smoking from the public.
2005 - Four bomb blasts on London transport during morning rush hour kill 56 people and injure 700.
2006 - Spain reports its first case of H5N1 bird flu, discovered in a wild fowl in a marshland area.
2007 - A suicide truck bomber blasts a Shi’ite town north of Baghdad, Iraq, killing more than 100 people.
2011 - Rupert Murdoch’s News International closes Britain’s biggestselling newspaper, News of the World, amid mounting accusations that its journalists hacked into the phone voicemails of hundreds of celebrities, politicians, rival journalists and even 13-year-old murder victim Milly Dowler.
2013 - A runaway train derails and catches fire in the eastern Quebec town of Lac-megantic, killing dozens of people and igniting explosions and fires that destroy the downtown district. Today’s Birthday: Ringo Starr, British musician (1940-).