Today's Highlight

1992: A Scottish study finds that the French-made abortion pill RU-486 could also be used as a "morning-after" contraceptive by women who had had unprotected intercourse.

Other Events

1912: Montenegro declares war on Turkey. It is joined 10 days later by its neighbours in the First Balkan War.

1939: Germany incorporates western Poland into Third Reich in World War II.

1945: US President Harry Truman announces the secret of the atomic bomb would be shared only with Britain and Canada.

1954: Communist Vietnamese forces occupy Hanoi.

1962: Uganda becomes an independent nation within the British Commonwealth.

1984: China announces plan to make primary school education compulsory by 1990 and eradicate adult illiteracy by 1995.

1991: A new truce in Yugoslavia takes effect but any optimism about an end to the fighting in the breakaway republic of Croatia is tempered by the fact that it was the fourth negotiated cease-fire in three weeks.

1993: South African President FW de Klerk orders an army raid on an alleged terrorist group and five black youths are killed as controversy erupts because the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize jointly to him and Nelson Mandela.

1995: Guatemalan Defence Minister General Mario Enriquez Morales October resigns amid controversy over an attack by soldiers that left 11 Indian peasants dead and 17 injured in the Alta Verapaz province.

1996: Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat makes his first public visit to Israel and pledges to keep his police from firing again on Israeli soldiers.

1997: Scientists report the Pathfinder probe's exploration of Mars has yielded evidence that the planet was once hospitable to life.

2000: Security forces battle independence activists armed with bows and arrows in Indonesia's remote Irian Jaya province; 31 people are killed.

2002: Pakistan conducts tests of a medium-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. India responds with its own missile test.

2003: The ethnic Hutu rebel group Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) sign a peace agreement with the Burundian government designed to end fighting in the country's decade-long civil war.

2005: A powerful 7.6-magnitude earthquake in South Asia reduces villages to rubble and triggers landslides. More than 80,000 people are killed and over 3 million people are left homeless.

2006: Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters in Hungary call for the ouster of the Socialist prime minister because of his admission on a leaked tape that he had lied to the country about the economy.

2007: Prime Minister Gordon Brown says Britain will cut its troops in Iraq to 2,500 starting in the spring.

2008: Maldivian islanders vote in the first democratic presidential election in their nation's history.

2010: The Nobel committee awards its peace prize to imprisoned democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo on Friday, lending encouragement to China's dissident community and sending a rebuke to the authoritarian government, which sharply condemns the award.

Today's highlights

Allison Cockburn, Scottish poet (1713-1794); Juan Peron, Argentine president (1895-1974); Paul Hogan, Australian comedian-actor (1939-); Chevy Chase, US actor/comedian (1943-); Sigourney Weaver, US actress (1949-).