Today’s Highlight

1973: The Bahamas gains independence after three centuries of British rule.

Other Events

1559: Mary, Queen of Scots, claims title of Queen of England in opposition to Elizabeth I. Her political actions provoke rebellion among the Scottish nobles and she is beheaded in 1587 as a Catholic threat to the English throne.

1609: The Catholic League is formed in Munich to oppose the Protestant Union, raising tensions in Germany that erupts in Thirty Years’ War.

1962: Telstar satellite is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, bringing live television from the US to Europe for the first time.

1990: Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev is re-elected leader of Soviet Communist Party.

1991: Boris Yeltsin takes oath of office as first elected president of Russia; US President George Bush lifts economic sanctions against South Africa. 1992: Polish parliament approves the country’s first woman prime minister, Hanna Suchocka.

1995: Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is freed from house arrest in Rangoon, Burma, now known as Yangon, Myanmar, days before completing her six-year detention.

1996: Unmanned Galileo spacecraft captures stunning close-up pictures of Ganymede, Jupiter’s biggest moon. 1997: Some 100,000 people demonstrate in London against proposed ban of fox hunting.

2000: A mountain of garbage loosened by rain collapses and bursts into flames at the biggest dump in Manila, Philippines, flattening squatters’ shanties and killing at least 216 people. 2004: Saudi Arabia says it will hold municipal elections in September, the first polls to be held in decades in the conservative kingdom, where political parties are banned and press freedoms are limited.

2008: Kuwait announces it will name its first ambassador to Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s troops invaded the country in 1990, a major step in healing the two countries’ painful past.

2009: Pope Benedict XVI stresses the church’s opposition to abortion and stem cell research in his first meeting with President Barack Obama, pressing the Vatican’s case with the US leader who is already under fire on those issues from some conservative US Roman Catholics and bishops.

Today’s Birthdays

Jean Calvin, French religious reformer (1509-1564); Camille Pissarro, French painter (1830-1903); Marcel Proust, French writer (1871-1922); Toyohiko Kagawa, Japanese writer (1888-1960); Giorgio de Chirico, Italian painter (1888-1978); Saul Bellow, US writer (1915-2005); Hugo Banzer, president of Bolivia (1926-2002); Arthur Ashe, US tennis player (1943-1993); Jessica Simpson, pop singer/actress (1980-).