On this day: Bill Clinton acquitted in impeachment trial

United States president Bill Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in an impeachment trial. Picture: AFP/Getty Images

1689: Declaration of Rights in England, in which William and Mary are proclaimed King and Queen for life.

1747: Boxing gloves were patented by Jack Broughton of London.

1797: To mark the Kaiser’s birthday, the first performance of Haydn’s Emperor Hymn took place in Vienna. The tune was adopted by Germany as its national anthem.

1898: Henry Lindfield of Brighton became the first British motorist to be killed in a car crash.

1912: Manchu Dynasty, and its boy emperor, were overthrown in China and provisional republic was established.

1915: The cornerstone for the Lincoln Memorial was laid in Washington DC.

1924: Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin was a hit at a concert in New York.

1953: Britain and Egypt reached agreement on Sudan.

1956: The first yellow No Parking lines made their appearance at Slough, Buckinghamshire.

1956: Soviet Union gave warning that dispatch of United States or British troops to Middle East would violate United Nations charter.

1970: An Israeli air raid on scrap metal plant in Egypt killed 70 civilians.

1973: First group of American prisoners were released from North Vietnam.

1974: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Soviet Nobel Prize winner, was arrested at his Moscow apartment.

1986: The Channel Tunnel agreement was signed at Canterbury.

1986: Andrija Artukovic, 86, was extradited from United States to Yugoslavia to stand trial over killing of more than 700,000 people during Nazi rule.

1990: Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner and West German Arvel Fuchs became the first men to cross Antarctica without dogs or machinery, covering 1,550 miles in 91 days.

1991: China jailed two alleged masterminds of Tiananmen Square protests, Wang Juntao and Chen Ziming, for 13 years for conspiracy to overthrow the government.

1992: United Nations secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali opened peace talks aimed at reaching a ceasefire in Somalia.

1994: Norwegian Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” was stolen from a museum in Oslo. It was recovered three months later in a police sting operation.

1997: An Iranian foundation increased the 1989 fatwa bounty for the murder of Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, to £1.53 million.

1999: United States president Bill Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in an impeachment trial stemming from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

2002: Pakistani authorities arrested Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-born Islamic militant, as the prime suspect in the January kidnapping of Daniel Pearl, a United States reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

2015: The £350 million Borders Railway, linking Edinburgh to Tweedbank, was completed, as the final section of track was laid.

ANNIVERSARIES:

Births: 1567 Thomas Campion, poet and musician; 1809 Charles Darwin, naturalist; 1809 Abraham Lincoln, 16th United States president; 1926 Lord Hamlyn, publisher; 1940 Ray Manzarek, American keyboard player (The Doors); 1952 Simon MacCorkindale, British actor.

Deaths: 1554: Lady Jane Grey; 1804 Immanuel Kant, philosopher and idealist; 1846 Rev Henry Duncan, founder of Dumfries and Galloway Courier, and of savings banks; 1984 Tom Keating, art faker; 2000 Charles Schulz, United States cartoonist (Peanuts.