Today is the 57th day of 2013. There are 308 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight

2006: Portia Simpson Miller is elected president of Jamaica's centre-left political party founded by Norman Manley in 1938, the People's National Party. She is the party's fourth president and its first female head.

Other Events

1815: Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from the Island of Elba to begin his second conquest of France.

1832: Polish Constitution is abolished by Russia's Czar Nicholas I.

1848: The Second French Republic is proclaimed.

1936: Military coup in Japan replaces Koki Hirota as premier.

1951: The 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution, limiting a president to two terms of office, is ratified.

1990: Nicaragua's 14-party opposition coalition led by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro scores stunning election upset victory over Daniel Ortega's Sandinistas.

1993: A bomb at the World Trade Centre in New York City kills six people and injures hundreds of others.

1994: Leading hard-liners who fought against President Boris Yeltsin's reforms walk free from their Russian prison after being granted amnesty by the new parliament.

1995: Averting a major trade war, China and the US sign an agreement mandating Chinese respect for copyrights, trademarks and patents.

1997: The Swiss government formally establishes a humanitarian fund for the benefit of Holocaust survivors.

1999: Ethiopian troops breach Eritrean lines in a disputed border area, and Eritrea soon says it will accept an African peace plan to halt the 10-month war.

2000: A Cuban diplomat who ignored a US demand that he leave the US is flown out of the country on a government plane. He had been linked to a Cuban-born US immigration official arrested in Miami on spy charges.

2005: African leaders hail Togo President Faure Gnassingbe's decision to step down from the presidency weeks after his army installed him, and show their approval by lifting sanctions while keeping up pressure for lasting democratic change.

2008: A "doomsday" seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opens deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.

2009: Head of the Seventh-day Adventist church in Jamaica, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas, Patrick Allen, is appointed Jamaica's governor general. He is the sixth person, and fifth Jamaican, to hold the position since iIndependence in 1962.