TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2009: UNICEF urges the world to help the 1 billion children still deprived of food, shelter, clean water or health care — and the hundreds of millions more threatened by violence — two decades after the UN adopted a treaty guaranteeing children’s rights.

OTHER EVENTS

1794: The United States and Britain sign the Jay Treaty, which resolves issues left over from the Revolutionary War.

1807: France invades Portugal.

1863: US President Abraham Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg address as he dedicates a national cemetery at the site of the Civil War battlefield in Pennsylvania.

1919: The US Senate rejects the Treaty of Versailles.

1942: Soviet troops counter-attack at Stalingrad and surround German troops in World War II.

1957: Thirty-one Cuban nationals about to sail for Cuba in a yacht loaded with arms, medical supplies and uniforms, for Fidel Castro’s rebel forces, are arrested by US agents.

1961: About 4,900 Algerian rebels in French prisons end a 19-day hunger strike after receiving assurances they will be treated as political prisoners.

1969: Apollo 12 astronauts Charles Conrad and Alan Bean make man’s second landing on the moon.

1973: The Cambodian presidential palace in Phnom Penh is bombed by a lone military pilot, killing three people and wounding 10. President Lon Nol, a target of the raid, is not injured.

1977: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat arrives in Israel on his first peace mission to that nation and receives a warm welcome from principal political leaders.

1979: Muslim militants seize Islam’s holiest shrine in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and are later driven out.

1980: A plane carrying 120 Cuban refugees arrives in Miami as an airlift of refugees from Havana begins. The new arrivals are among 600 Cubans stranded at the port of Mariel after the Cuban government closed the port and ended the boatlift of refugees to the United States in September.

1985: US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S Gorbachev meet for the first time at a summit in Geneva.

1990: Nepal adopts a new constitution, creating a democratic government, five months after a popular revolt reduces the all-powerful king to a constitutional monarch.

1992: In a big concession to the South African government, the ANC offers whites a guaranteed share of power in negotiations on a new constitution.

1994: Israeli troops kill four Arabs, as hundreds of Muslim militants throw stones and burn tyres in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to protest a crackdown by Palestinian police.

1995: A suicide bomber rams his explosive-packed truck into the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, killing 15 people.

1996: Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Pope John Paul II meet in a historic first encounter in Rome.

1998: The impeachment inquiry against US President Bill Clinton opens with testimony by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who accuses the president of perjury and obstructing justice.

2002: An oil tanker carrying 20 million gallons of fuel oil breaks in two and sinks in the Atlantic Ocean, threatening a spill nearly twice as big as the Exxon Valdez’s and an environmental catastrophe along the Spanish coastline.

2003: The South African cabinet approves a plan to spend approximately 1.9 billion rand (US$287 million) to launch a programme to provide anti-retroviral drugs to AIDS patients free of charge. The programme would be fully implemented by 2008.

2004: Sudanese government and rebel officials again pledge to end the 21-year civil war in southern Sudan — this time making the pledge before the UN Security Council.

2005: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accuses Washington of plotting to overthrow him and wants to expel American missionaries he claims have links to the CIA.

2006: Russia and the United States sign a key trade agreement, removing the last major obstacle in Moscow’s 13-year journey to join the World Trade Organisation.

2007: The UN-backed genocide tribunal in Cambodia arrests the former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan, 76, following his release from a hospital in the capital.

2008: The recent commitments on global warming by US President-elect Barack Obama mark a new beginning for world negotiations to replace the Kyoto Protocol, the head of the UN’s climate change body Yvo de Boer says.

2010: President Barack Obama wins NATO summit agreement to build a missile shield over Europe, an ambitious commitment to protect against Iranian attack while demonstrating the alliance’s continuing relevance — but at the risk of further aggravating Russia.

2011: Moammar Gadhafi’s former heir apparent Seif al-Islam is captured by revolutionary fighters in the southern desert just over a month after his father was killed, setting off joyous celebrations across Libya and closing the door on the possibility that the fugitive son could stoke further insurrection.

2012: President Barack Obama pays the first visit by an American leader to Myanmar and Cambodia, two Asian countries with troubled histories, one on the mend and the other still a cause for concern.

— AP