TODAY IN HISTORY

1883: The United States and Canada adopted a system of Standard Time zones.

1963: The Bell System introduced the first commercial touch-tone telephone system in Carnegie and Greensburg, Pennsylvania. 1966: U.S. Roman Catholic bishops did away with the rule against eating meat on Fridays outside of Lent.

1976: Spain’s parliament approved a bill to establish a democracy after 37 years of dictatorship.

1978: U.S. Rep. Leo J. Ryan, D-Calif., and four others were killed in Jonestown, Guyana, by members of the Peoples Temple; the killings were followed by a night of mass murder and suicide by more than 900 cult members.

1987: The congressional Iran-Contra committees issued their final report, saying President Ronald Reagan bore “ultimate responsibility” for wrongdoing by his aides. A fire at London King’s Cross railway station claimed 31 lives.

1999: 12 people were killed when a bonfire under construction at Texas A-and-M University collapsed. A jury in Jasper, Texas, convicted Shawn Allen Berry of murder for his role in the dragging death of James Byrd Jr., but spared him the death penalty.

2003: The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled 4-to-3 that the state constitution guaranteed gay couples the right to marry.

2004: Former President Bill Clinton’s library opened in Little Rock, Arkansas; in attendance were President George W. Bush, former President George H.W. Bush and former President Jimmy Carter. Former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry, convicted of killing four black girls in the racially motivated bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama, church in 1963, died in prison at age 74.

2005: Eight months after Robert Blake was acquitted at a criminal trial of murdering his wife, a civil jury decided the actor was behind the slaying and ordered him to pay Bonny Lee Bakley’s children $30 million.

2013: Toronto’s city council voted to strip scandal-plagued Mayor Rob Ford of many of his powers following a heated debate in which he knocked over a city councilor.