Today is 115th day of 2013. There are 250 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1983: Soviet leader Yuri V Andropov invites 10-year-old Samantha Smith to visit his country after receiving a letter in which the schoolgirl from Maine expressed fears about nuclear war.

OTHER EVENTS

1707: British forces are defeated at Almanza, Spain.

1792: Highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier becomes the first person under French law to be executed by guillotine.

1809: Britain concludes treaty of friendship with Sikhs at Amritsar in India.

1859: Austria suppresses revolt in Krakow, Poland; Ground is broken for the Suez Canal.

1915: Allied soldiers invade the Gallipoli Peninsula in an unsuccessful attempt to take the Ottoman Turkish Empire out of World War I. The event is now commemorated as Anzac Day.

1942: In the first US counter-attack of the war, 16 bombers make a daring daylight raid on Tokyo; A coal mine disaster in Benxi, Japanese-occupied China, kills 1,549 workers – the world’s worst mining disaster at the time.

1945: Delegates of 45 nations meet in San Francisco to organise the United Nations.

1957: US Sixth Fleet sails for eastern Mediterranean as King Hussein proclaims martial law in Jordan and seals frontiers after a Palestinian coup attempt.

1974: Portugal’s bloodless “Revolution of the Carnations” ends 48 years of rightist dictatorship.

1988: South Africa says it has accepted a Western plan aimed at preparing south-west Africa, now Namibia, for independence under black majority rule.

1989: Japan’s Prime Minister Noburu Takeshita, rapidly losing popularity amid influence-peddling scandal, announces plans to resign.

1990: Violeta Barrio de Chamorro is inaugurated as president of Nicaragua amid uproar over a decision to let leftist Sandinistas keep control of the army and security police.

1993: Russian President Boris Yeltsin wins vote of confidence in referendum but fails to force new parliamentary elections.

1996: A Spanish Supreme Court judge clears Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez of involvement in the assassinations of Basque separatists during the 1980s.

1997: In what is called a monumental defeat for the US tobacco industry, a federal judge rules for the first time that tobacco can be regulated as a drug.

1998: Millions of Nigerians boycott legislative elections billed by the ruling junta as a first step toward democracy.

2000: The United Nations releases a new assessment of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, saying the worst health consequences for millions of people may be yet to come.

2002: The US House of Representatives approves a measure to split the Immigration and Naturalisation Service into two separate enforcement and service branches; making immigration reform a top priority in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

2012: Scientists say tiny meteorites found in the Sierra foothills of Northern California likely were part of a giant fireball that exploded in daylight with about one-third the explosive force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II.

Today’s Birthdays

Oliver Cromwell, English statesman (1599-1658); Guglielmo Marconi, Italian radio pioneer (1874-1937); Morris West, Australian author (1916-1999); Ella Fitzgerald, US singer (1918-1996); Al Pacino, US actor (1940-); Bjorn Ulvaeus, Swedish musician-composer, ABBA member (1945-); Talia Shire, US actress (1946-); Renee Zellweger, US actress (1969-).