Today’s Highlight

1913: The Mona Lisa is recovered in Italy, two years after it was stolen from the Louvre museum in Paris.

Other Events

1642: Dutch navigator Abel Tasman lands on New Zealand.

1800: Washington, DC is established as the capital of the US.

1870: Joseph H Rainey of South Carolina takes his seat in the US House of Representatives, becoming the first black congressman.

1875: Sultan of Turkey promises reforms throughout Ottoman Empire to meet rebel demands.

1887: Turkey appeals to Western powers to mediate its war with Russia.

1894: Japanese troops invade Korea.

1899: African-American George Grant receives the first patent for a golf tee.

1905: Russia’s Czar Nicholas II grants constitution in Montenegro.

1920: Martial law is declared in Cork, Ireland.

1935: Nationalists demand restitution of Egypt’s Constitution of 1923.

1946: A UN committee votes to accept a six-block tract of Manhattan real estate offered as a gift by John D Rockefeller Jr to be the site of UN headquarters.

1953: US test pilot Chuck Yeager reaches Mach 2.3 (2.3 times the speed of sound) in a Bell X-1A rocket plane.

1963: Kenya becomes independent within British Commonwealth and a republic a year later.

1969: Greece, under fire on charges of violating human rights, withdraws from the Council of Europe before it can be expelled.

1975: A group of generals, led by Major General Chun Doo-hwan, stage an army coup in South Korea and seize power.

1989: British begin forced repatriation of Vietnamese refugees from camps in Hong Kong.

1990: Bangladesh’s deposed President Hossain Muhammad Ershad is put under house arrest.

1992: A strong earthquake kills 2,500 people on Flores Island, eastern Indonesia.

1993: President Boris Yeltsin wins approval of his new constitution, but extreme nationalists and Communists make a strong showing in Russia’s first multiparty elections since the 1917 Revolution.

1994: The Brazilian supreme court acquits former President Fernando Collor de Mello of corruption charges.

1997: Russia reaches an agreement with the International Monetary Fund for $1.7 billion in loans, giving the state a chance to pay back wages to millions of public employees.

1999: A Maltese-registered tanker, the Erika, breaks in two during a violent sea storm off the north-west coast of France, spilling some three million gallons (11.4 million litres) of heavy oil.

2000: The US Supreme Court reverses the Florida Supreme Court’s order to begin manual recounts of presidential votes in certain counties and Democrat Al Gore concedes defeat to Republican George W Bush.

2003: Germany says it will build a national memorial to homosexuals persecuted or killed under the Nazis, complementing the planned German memorial to the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.

2006: Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, known as “the butcher of Addis Ababa”, is convicted of genocide in a rare case of an African strongman being held to account by his own country.

2009: Emails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled sceptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages do not support claims that the science of global warming was faked.

2010: Israel’s leader dismisses a call from a key government partner to share the holy city of Jerusalem with the Palestinians, a reminder of the obstacles facing already troubled peacemaking efforts.

Today’s Birthdays

John Jay, US revolutionary, diplomat, Supreme Court Justice (1745-1829); Gustave Flaubert, French author (1821-1880); Edvard Munch, Norwegian artist (1863-1944); John Osborne, English playwright (1929-1994); Frank Sinatra, US singer/actor (1915-1998); Bob Barker, US game show host (1923-); Jennifer Connelly, US actress (1970-).

— AP