Today is the 235th day of 2013. There are 130 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1973: Four people are taken hostage by a robber in a Stockholm bank in Sweden. During the six-day drama, the captor and captives develop a friendship later described as “the Stockholm syndrome”.

OTHER EVENTS

1305: Scottish rebel leader William Wallace is hung, drawn and quartered for treason in London.

1838: The first American women’s college, Mount Holyoke, holds its first graduation.

1839: Hong Kong is taken by British in war with China.

1914: Japan declares war on Germany in World War I.

1958: China provokes an international crisis by bombarding the island of Quemoy, held by Taiwan.

1962: US Telstar satellite relays the first live television programme between United States and Europe.

1969: Archaeologists unearth a 3,400-year-old city buried by volcanic ash beneath Thira, capital of Santorini island. Two-storey buildings, Minoan painted vases, a medicine cabinet and storage jars are uncovered. The city is named “Prehistoric Pompeii”.

1982: Lebanon’s parliament elects Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayel president. He is assassinated three weeks later.

1986: Leaders of nine southern African nations, meeting in Angola, express support for international economic sanctions against South Africa.

1990: Soviet Republic of Armenia declares independence, and Estonia begins formal negotiations with Kremlin on separation from Soviet Union.

1991: Leftist rebels bomb Colombia’s main oil pipeline, forcing the country to suspend pumping of crude petroleum.

1993: UN peacekeepers reach trapped Muslims in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, for the first time in two months and find 55,000 people on the verge of starvation.

1995: The first group of peacekeepers pull out of the UN “safe area” of Gorazde, a withdrawal criticised as leaving the Bosnian enclave vulnerable.

1997: Iran’s new moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, appoints a female vice-president, the first woman to serve in a top government post since Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

2000: A Gulf Air Airbus A320 crashed into shallow Persian Gulf waters after circling and trying to land in Bahrain, killing all 143 people aboard.

2002: Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe unexpectedly dissolves his cabinet and ousts moderates. A move officials say is related to his controversial programme to seize land from white farmers and redistribute it to landless blacks.

2003: John Geoghan, a former Roman Catholic priest whose January 2002 sexual abuse conviction sparked a widespread abuse scandal in the Catholic church, is beaten and strangled to death in prison.

2005: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan tours the hunger-stricken desert nation

of Niger as a French aid group accuses the world body of responding to the crisis too late and with too little.

2007: Pakistan’s Supreme Court rules that former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif can return to Pakistan from exile.

2009: The outcry over alleged vote fraud in Afghanistan’s election escalates, with President Hamid Karzai’s chief opponent charging that turnout figures were padded.

2011: A pair of judges puts an end to the sensational sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, setting him free after prosecutors argued the hotel housekeeper accusing the French former head of the International Monetary Fund of sexual assault could not be trusted.TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Francois Hotman, French political author (1524-1590); France’s King Louis XVI (1754-1793); Arnold Toynbee, British historian (1852-1883); Gene Kelly, US actor-dancer (1912-1996); Barbara Eden, US actress (1934-); Shelley Long, US actress (1949-); Queen Noor, American-born widow of Jordan’s King Hussein (1951-).

—AP