Today in History

1639 – Cambridge College, Massachusetts, is renamed Harvard for clergyman John Harvard.

1781 – German-born English astronomer William Hershel discovers Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun.

1868 – The first impeachment trial of a US president, Andrew Johnson, right, begins.

1881 – A revolutionary group assassinates Tsar Alexander II by exploding a bomb in the streets of St Petersburg.

1884 – Using Greenwich, England, as the point from which all time is measured, an international time standard is adopted across the US.

1900 – France limits the length of the working day for women and children to 11 hours.

1913 – New Australian federal capital officially named Canberra.

1930 – Clyde Tombaugh announces discovery of Pluto.

1956 – New Zealand wins its first cricket test, against the West Indies, in Auckland.

1992 – A 6.2 magnitude quake in Turkey kills at least 570 people.

1996 – A gunman in Dunblane, Scotland, shoots to death 16 children and a teacher.

2001 – Peter Ellis, imprisoned for child sex abuse after a trial centring on the Christchurch Civic Creche – is denied a pardon after authorities reject concerns about the contamination of evidence.

2012 – Former News International executive Rebekah Brooks and her husband Charlie are arrested in

British phone hacking scandal.

2018 – US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is fired via a tweet from President Donald Trump.

Birthdays

Percival Lowell, US astronomer (1855-1916); Sir Hugh Walpole, NZborn novelist (1884-1941); L Ron Hubbard, US founder of Scientology (1911-86); Neil Sedaka, US singer (1939-); Dame Sian Elias, retiring NZ chief justice (1949-); Adam Clayton, UK-born musician (1960-).