Today’s Highlights

1937: Millionaire Howard Hughes sets a transcontinental air record by flying his monoplane from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey, in 7 hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds.

Other Events

1493: France and Spain sign Treaty of Barcelona; Maximilian, King of the Romans, saves Germany from French invasion at Battle of Salinas.

1649: Trial of England’s King Charles I for treason begins.

1795: French forces overrun Holland.

1812: British forces under Duke of Wellington take Ciudad Rodrigo in Spain.

1825: Ezra Daggett and Thomas Kinsett patent the tin-canning process for food, pioneering the age of convenience for housewives and armies alike.

1918: The Bolsheviks dissolve Russian Constitutional Assembly in Petrograd.

1938: General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist air force bombs Spanish cities of Barcelona and Valencia, killing 700 people.

1944: The US government relinquishes control of the nation’s railroads after settling a wage dispute.

1945: Soviet troops take Krakow, Poland, in World War II.

1956: Sudan joins Arab League as ninth member.

1960: United States and Japan sign treaty of mutual security.

1966: India’s new prime minister, Indira Gandhi, pledges to follow path of nonalignment in world affairs.

1974: Five Russians, including a senior diplomat and two other members of the Soviet embassy staff, are expelled from China on espionage charges.

1975: Britain and Irish Republican Army announce first direct negotiations since start of guerrilla activity in Northern Ireland six years earlier.

1981: The United States and Iran sign an agreement paving the way for the release of 52 Americans held hostage for more than 14 months.

1983: The American Psychiatric Association urges a tightening of the rules for the use of the insanity plea in criminal trials.

1988: Czechoslovak government rules out any chance that ousted Communist Party leader Alexander Dubcek be allowed to return to public life.

1989: Soviet Union announces it will unilaterally withdraw some of its short-range nuclear missiles from Europe.

1990: Washington, DC, Mayor Marion Barry is arraigned on charges of crack cocaine possession.

1992: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s coalition government loses its parliamentary majority.

1993: The Israeli parliament votes to repeal a law prohibiting contact with the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

1994: An AC-130 transport plane is hit by small-arms fire near Sarajevo, prompting UN officials to suspend the city’s vital airlift.

1995: Separatist fighters abandon Chechnya’s presidential palace after Russian artillery and rocket fire destroy it.

1996: Chechen sympathisers who hijacked a Turkish ferry surrender, ending a four-day ordeal for more than 240 hostages.

1997: A powerful car bomb explodes outside a cafe in downtown Algiers, killing at least 20 people and wounding 60 others — hours after attackers massacred 36.

1998: Peru and Ecuador agree on a timetable for a peace treaty to formally end their 1995 border war.

2000: Michael Skakel — nephew of the late Senator Robert Kennedy — surrenders in Greenwich, Connecticut, to face charges that he beat a childhood friend to death 24 years before.

2001: Prosecutors say Los Angeles-area airports may have been potential targets of Ahmed Ressam, arrested for bringing bomb-making material into the United States from Canada.

2002: The Sudanese government and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, the main rebel group involved in the country’s 19-year-old civil war, sign a cease-fire agreement for the disputed Nuba Mountains region.

2003: Indian officials say an intense cold spell in parts of India, Bangladesh and Nepal has claimed 1,300 lives across the region since December 2002. Millions of people living outdoors and in uninsulated homes are threatened with exposure.

2004: A Japanese team that returns from a mission to investigate the United States’ first confirmed case of mad cow disease warns that American and Canadian cows were still vulnerable to an outbreak of the illness.

2005: The presidents of Colombia and Brazil meet on their Amazon jungle border to discuss the dispute between Colombia and another neighbour, Venezuela, sparked by the abduction of a Marxist guerrilla on Venezuelan soil. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, emerges as a potential mediator.

2006: A Palestinian suicide bomber blows himself up at a crowded Tel Aviv restaurant, wounding 15 people in an apparent attempt to destabilise the region just a week before the Palestinian parliamentary election.

2007: The United Nations’ first all-female peacekeeping contingent — made up of 105 Indian policewomen who have been training since September — is set to deploy to Liberia.

2008: The bodies of nearly 50 Africans trying to immigrate wash up on Yemen’s shores after their boat capsizes in the treacherous waters of the Gulf of Aden. The 35 survivors tell authorities that at least 135 people, all Somalis and Ethiopians, were crammed into the boat.

2009: Russia and Ukraine sign a deal that restores natural gas shipments to Ukraine and paves the way for an end to the nearly two-week cut-off of most Russian gas to a freezing Europe.

2010: US troops land on the lawn of Haiti’s shattered presidential palace to the cheers of quake victims, and the UN said it would throw more police and soldiers into the sluggish global effort to aid the devastated country beset by outbursts of violence that have slowed distribution of supplies.

2011: Palestinian diplomats find international support for their complaint that Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory are illegal, but the US strongly opposes bringing the matter up in the UN Security Council.