Today is the 343rd day of 2011. There are 22 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

2007: The world’s top two polluters, the US and China, say they are not ready to commit to mandatory caps on global warming gases at the UN climate conference in Bali.

Other Events

1793: Noah Webster establishes New York City’s first daily newspaper.

1884: Ball-bearing roller skates are patented in the US.

1905: Separation of church and state in France is decreed.

1941: China declares war on Japan, Germany and Italy.

1946: Indian Constituent Assembly is boycotted by Muslim League.

1951: The US invokes its Trading with the Enemy Act to prevent Chinese people in the US from sending money to Communist China under extortion threats.

1962: Tanganyika becomes a republic within the British Commonwealth.

1990: Poles elect Solidarity labour union founder Lech Walesa president in free elections.

1991: Gorbachev calls new Commonwealth of Independent States “illegal and dangerous”.

1992: Prince Charles and Princess Diana of Britain announce they are separating but have no plans

to divorce.

1994: After 25 years of violence, the Irish Republican Army sits down with British officials to talk peace; US President Bill Clinton fires Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders after learning she had told a conference that masturbation should be discussed in school as a part of human sexuality.

1995: In India, 75-million children get polio vaccines in an attempt to eradicate the crippling disease.

1997: Spain softens its long-standing claim on the British colony of Gibraltar, saying it can accept shared sovereignty.

2002: The Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement sign a peace agreement to end the rebel group’s 26-year-old separatist insurgency in Aceh province, which left as many as 30,000 people dead.

2004: Canada’s Supreme Court rules that gay marriage is constitutional, a landmark opinion allowing the federal government to call on Parliament to legalise same-sex unions nationwide.

2008: Masked youths and looters maraud through Greek cities for a fourth night in an explosion of rage triggered by the police shooting of a teenager that has unleashed the most violent riots in a quarter century.

2010: In Britain’s worst political violence in years, furious student protesters rain sticks and rocks on riot police, vandalise government buildings and attack a car carrying Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, after lawmakers approved a controversial hike in university tuition fees.

Today’s Birthdays

John Milton, English poet (1608-1674); Karl Wilhelm Scheele, Swedish chemist (1742-1786); Claude-Louis Ertholle, French chemist (1748-1822); Kirk Douglas, US actor (1916-); Bob Hawke, former Australian prime minister (1929-); Judi Dench, British actress (1934-); Beau Bridges, US actor (1941-); John Malkovich, US actor (1953-).