TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
1978: The College of Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church chooses Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland to be the new pope; he takes the name John Paul II. He is the first non-italian pope in 456 years.
OTHER EVENTS
1793: Queen Marie Antoinette is beheaded during the French Revolution.
1846: American dentist
William Morton demonstrates the effectiveness of ether as an anaesthetic by administering it to a patient undergoing jaw surgery.
1859: Anti-slavery activist John Brown leads a group of about 20 men in a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The rebels are soon killed, but the incident brings the American Civil War closer.
1916: Margaret Sanger opens the first birth-control clinic in the US, in New York City.
1946: Ten Nazi war criminals condemned during the Nuremberg trials are hung.
1949: The new German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, establishes formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
1952: An estimated 10,000 Communist-led Viet Minh troops launch an offensive in northwestern Indochina, overrunning French Union forces in the Nghialo basin.
1962: The Cuban missile crisis begins when US President John F Kennedy is informed by his aides that reconnaissance photographs reveal the presence of Soviet missile bases in Cuba.
1964: China detonates its first atomic bomb.
1970: Anwar Sadat is elected president of Egypt, succeeding the late Gamal Abdel Nasser.
1973: Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho are named winners of the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire in the Vietnam war; the Vietnamese official declines the award saying the Vietnamese do not have peace, so he cannot accept a peace award. The war continues for a few more years.
1987: Rescuers free Jessica Mcclure, an 18-month-old girl trapped in an abandoned well for 58 hours in Midland, Texas.
1990: US President George H W Bush signs the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act, prohibiting employers from discriminating against older workers in providing pensions and disability payments.
1991: A man crashes a pickup truck into a restaurant in Killeen,
Texas, and shoots patrons, killing 23 people before taking his own life.
1994: Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Government wins a thin majority in Germany’s elections.
1995: A vast throng of black men gather in Washington for the “Million Man March” led by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
1996: Fans try to squeeze into a World Cup-qualifying soccer match in Guatemala City, killing 78 people and injuring more than 100 in the crush.
1998: British police arrest former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London for questioning about allegations that he had murdered Spanish citizens during his years in power.
2002: The North Korean Government admits it had been conducting a major covert nuclearweapons development programme for several years, in violation of international agreements.
2003: Pope John Paul II celebrates the 25th anniversary of his election as pope, making him the fourth-longest serving pope in Roman Catholic Church history.
2006: Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka ram a truck packed with explosives into a convoy of military buses, killing at least 93 sailors in one of the deadliest insurgent attacks since a 2002 ceasefire.
2007: Libya wins a seat on the powerful UN Security Council as a non-permanent two-year term member.
2008: The long-time private secretary of the late Pope John Paul II reveals in a film that the pope was lightly wounded in a 1982 knife attack by a priest in Portugal.
2010: Officials have taken the extraordinary step of warning some flights landing at France’s main airport to come with enough fuel to get back home, bracing for a possible fuel shortage after a new round of protests against plans to raise the retirement age to 62.
2011: The resurgent French left, riding on popular anger at conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy and global financial markets, endorses former Socialist Party chief Francois Holland as its candidate for next year’s presidential elections.
2012: The Cuban Government says it will eliminate a halfcentury-old restriction that requires citizens to get an exit visa to leave the country. With national polls showing a dead heat three weeks before Election Day, President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney met for their second debate. During the town hall-style encounter in suburban New York, Obama accused Romney of favouring a “one-point plan” to help the rich at the expense of the middle class, while Romney countered by saying “the middle class has been crushed over the last four years”.
2014: Dozens of Hong Kong police descend on a pro-democracy zone to remove barricades in a dawn raid.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Oscar Wilde, British writer (18541900); David Ben-gurion, first prime minister of Israel (1886-1973); Eugene O’neill, US playwright and Nobel laureate (1888-1953); Michael Collins, Irish leader (18901922); Enver Hoxha, Albanian Communist leader (1908-1985); Angela Lansbury, actress (1925- ); Guenther Grass, German writer (1927-2015), Tim Robbins, actor/ director (1958- ); John Mayer, pop/ rock singer (1977- ).