TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2010: American scientists deliberately infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis 60 years ago, a recently unearthed experiment that prompted US officials to apologise and declare outrage over “such reprehensible research”.

OTHER EVENTS

1273: Count Rudolf IV of Habsburg is crowned German King Rudolf and establishes the house of Habsburg in Austrian provinces.

1596: Duke of Norfolk is imprisoned by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth for attempting to marry Mary Queen of Scots.

1838: The first Anglo-Afghan War begins with the British heading for Kabul to prevent increasing Russian influence from threatening British position in India.

1887: Baluchistan is united with India.

1949: The People’s Republic of China is proclaimed in Beijing under Mao Zedong, with Zhou Enlai as premier and foreign minister.

1953: United States agrees to give France US$385 million in aid to train and equip more Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian troops and increase temporary French forces in Indo-China.

1964: The US Free Speech Movement is launched at the University of California at Berkeley.

1970: Egypt’s Vice-President Anwar Sadat succeeds the late Gamal Abdel Nasser as president.

1971: Walt Disney World opens in Orlando, Florida.

1978: South Pacific archipelago of Tuvalu, formerly the Ellice Islands, becomes independent from Britain.

1980: Warsaw court gives legal approval to Poland’s first six independent trade unions.

1986: Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s presidential library and museum is dedicated in Atlanta.

1989: Denmark becomes the first nation in the world to allow homosexuals to marry.

1991: US President George H W Bush condemns the military coup in Haiti, suspending economic and military aid and demanding that President Jean-Bertrand Aristide be returned to power.

1994: The US National Hockey League team owners begin a 103-day lockout of their players.

2008: The last czar and his family were victims of political repression, Russia’s Supreme Court rules, formally restoring the Romanov name and furthering a Kremlin effort to encourage patriotism by celebrating the country’s czarist past.

2009: Death toll climbs to more than 1,000 after a 7.6 magnitude earthquake ripples through Sumatra, the westernmost island in the Indonesian archipelago.

2010: American scientists deliberately infected prisoners and patients in a

2011: President Hamid Karzai gives up trying to talk to the Taliban, saying in a video that Pakistan holds the only key to making peace with insurgents and must do more to support a political resolution to the war.

2012: A manifesto complaining about Iran’s stumbling economy addressed to the labor minister gets 10,000 signatures in one of the most wide-reaching public outcries over the state of country’s economy, which has received a double pounding from tightening Western sanctions and alleged mismanagement by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government.