Today in History
1431 – Joan of Arc is accused of relapsing into heresy by donning male clothing again, providing justification for her execution.
1742 – The first indoor swimming pool opens, in London.
1830 – US Congress authorises native Indians to be removed from all states to the western prairie.
1845 – A fire in Quebec City, Canada, destroys more than 1500 houses. Another huge fire ravages the city a month later.
1912 – Australian Jimmy Matthews becomes the first bowler to take two hat-tricks in the same cricket test, and on the same day.
1920 – Fingerprints are used to help convict a murderer in New Zealand. Police found Dennis Gunn’s prints on three cash boxes from a robbery in which Auckland postmaster Augustus Braithwaite was killed. Gunn is hanged in Auckland on June 22.
1936 – Alan Turing, left, submits his paper On Computable Numbers to a mathematics society, setting out the theoretical basis for modern computers.
1961 – Peter Benenson publishes ‘‘The Forgotten Prisoners’’ in The
Observer, in London, heralding the creation of Amnesty International.
1972 – Burglars break into the Democratic National Headquarters at Watergate in Washington DC.
1995 – At least 1500 people die in an earthquake on Sakhalin Island in Russia’s far east.
2019 – Johnson & Johnson goes on trial in Oklahoma accused of deceptively marketing painkillers and downplaying risks of addiction, helping to create the United States’ ‘‘opioid epidemic’’.