Today, Wednesday, June 2, is the 153rd day of 2010. There are 212 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

1999: The African National Congress wins resoundingly in South Africa’s second post-apartheid elections.

Other Notable Events

1815: Napoleon Bonaparte issues a liberal constitution in France.

1924: US Congress confirms citizenship of all Native Americans.

1946: In a referendum, Italians choose a republic over the Savoy monarchy.

1949: Transjordan is renamed the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

1953: Queen Elizabeth II of Britain is crowned in Westminster Abbey, 16 months after the death of her father, King George VI.

1964: The Palestine Liberation Organisation is formed.

1966: Indonesia and Malaysia agree to end five years of hostilities.

1974: Jigme Singye Wangchuk is crowned King of Bhutan at age 18, becoming the youngest monarch in the world.

1979: Pope John Paul II arrives in his native Poland on the first visit by a pope to a Communist country.

1992: In a referendum, Danes reject the Maastricht treaty on a strongly united European Union.

1996: Hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu makes his first speech since winning the Israeli election and pledges to continue peace talks with the Palestinians.

1997: Timothy J McVeigh, a US Army veteran, is convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing that took 168 lives in 1995. He is later sentenced to death and executed.

2000: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission grants amnesty to apartheid death squad commander Eugene de Kock (called “Prime Evil” by the South African media) and other former police for six muder cases. Kock is, however, still in prison serving time for the remaining 83 charges laid against him.

2001: The Colombian government and leftist guerrillas agree to swap sick prisoners in the first major breakthrough since peace talks began more than two years ago.

2002: Irish rock star Bono and US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill end 12-day tour of Africa, raising awareness of the problems faced by the world’s poorest continent.

2003: Mars Express, a European Space Agency craft carrying an unmanned British-built probe to the planet Mars, is launched aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

2004: Former rebel commanders capture a strategic town in eastern Congo, setting off a crisis that threatens the Central African country’s fragile transitional government and a peace agreement that ended five years of civil war.

2005: Israel releases hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, fulfilling a months-old pledge officials hope will help bolster Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and his moderate allies.

2006: Five thousand Somalis denounce the US and call for Islamic law at a protest in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, where Islamic militias were battling a secular alliance that the Islamists accused the US of backing.

2008: Nepal’s deposed king agrees to peacefully leave the royal palace in Kathmandu and live as a common citizen after the Himalayan nation last week declared itself a republic.

2009: Brazilian military planes find a 3-mile (5-kilometre) path of wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean, confirming that an Air France jet carrying 228 people crashed in the sea.

Today’s Birthdays

Jan Sobieski, king of Poland (1624-1698); Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade, French writer (1740-1814); “Count” Alessandro Cagliostro, Italian charlatan (1743-1795); Ion Bratianu, Romanian statesman (1821-1891); Thomas Hardy, English writer (1840-1928); Constantine II, exiled King of Greece (1940-); Charlie Watts, English drummer with the Rolling Stones (1941-); Dana Carvey, actor/comedian (1955-); Lasse Hallstrom, Swedish director (1946-).