Today is the 326th day of 2013. There are 39 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1963: US President John F Kennedy is assassinated as he rides in motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Vice-President Lyndon B Johnson becomes the 36th president.

OTHER EVENTS

1718: English pirate Edward Teach — better known as “Blackbeard” — is killed during a battle off the Virginia coast.

1906: The “SOS” distress signal is adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin.

1935: The flying boat, The China Clipper, leaves San Francisco on the first trans-Pacific airmail flight.

1943: Lebanon is granted independence after two decades of French mandate rule; Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Franklin D Roosevelt, and China’s Chiang Kai-shek agree in Cairo, Egypt, on measures to defeat Japan in World War II.

1962: Soviet Union announces end of combat-readiness alert of its armed forces imposed at start of Cuban missile crisis.

1972: US President Richard Nixon lifts 22-year-old ban on American travel to China.

1974: UN General Assembly gives the Palestine Liberation Organisation observer status.

1977: The British and French supersonic airliner Concorde begins service out of New York’s Kennedy International Airport after lengthy dispute over noise levels.

1989: Lebanese President Rene Mouawad is assassinated.

1990: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, after being defeated by John Major in a ballot for Conservative Party leader, resigns after 11 1/2 years in office.

1991: Ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide meets with a group of legislators to negotiate an end to Haiti’s constitutional crisis. It is the first meeting between the two sides since Aristide’s overthrow in a military-led coup.

1993: Mexican Senate approves North American Free Trade Agreement.

1994: Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi is placed under investigation in a bribery probe.

2001: The Turkish Parliament approves revisions to the country’s 75-year-old civil code to recognise men and women as equal before the law.

2002: Officials cancel the Miss World pageant in Nigeria and move it instead to London after news that the African nation will host the event sparks deadly riots.

2004: Opposition supporters gather to protest alleged fraud in Ukraine’s presidential run-off, which European monitors say was marred by official interference and suspiciously high turnout figures.

2005: Conservative Angela Merkel takes power as Germany’s first female chancellor and the country’s first leader to grow up under communism in the Soviet-occupied East.