Today is the 339th day of 2013. There are 26 days left in the year.

TODAY’ HIGHLIGHT

1996: US President Bill Clinton names UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright as the country’s first female secretary of state.

OTHER EVENTS

1560: Charles IX succeeds as King of France on death of Francis II.

1776: The first scholastic fraternity in America, Phi Beta Kappa, is organised at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

1792: Trial of France’s King Louis XVI begins; revolutionary coup takes place in Geneva; George Washington is re-elected US president and John Adams as vice-president.

1797: Napoleon Bonaparte arrives in Paris to command forces for an invasion of England.

1812: Napoleon Bonaparte leaves his troops retreating from Russia and sets out for Paris.

1848: US President James Polk triggers the Gold Rush of ’49 by confirming gold was discovered in California.

1934: Soviet Union executes 66 people charged with plotting against the Stalin government; Parliament grants Turkish women voting and election rights as part of modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s westernisation reforms.

1936: Soviet Union adopts new constitution under a Supreme Council.

1955: The American Federation of Labour and the Congress of Industrial Organisations merges to form the AFL-CIO under its first president, George Meany.

1956: British and French forces begin withdrawal from Egypt in the Suez War; Union of British Togoland and Ghana is approved.

1971: Soviet Union, at UN Security Council, vetoes resolution calling for ceasefire in hostilities between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.

1977: Egypt breaks diplomatic relations with five Arab nations that were hostile to President Anwar Sadat’s peace overtures to Israel.

1989: Israeli soldiers kill five heavily armed Arab guerrillas, who the military says crossed the border from Egypt to launch a terrorist attack commemorating anniversary of Palestinian uprising.

1990: US troops arrest former Panamanian police official after he escapes from prison by helicopter and takes over national police headquarters.

1993: A letter bomb blast injures Vienna’s mayor in his home. It is the fifth explosive sent in three days to journalists, priests and others linked to Austria’s immigrant community.

1994: Russia seals the border of the breakaway republic of Chechnya and both the Chechen government and opposition leaders express fears of imminent Russian intervention.

1995: Tel Aviv district court indicts Yigal Amir, the confessed assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, along with two of his suspected accomplices.

1997: Cuauhtemoc Cardenas is inaugurated as the first popularly elected mayor of Mexico City. Cardenas, who many Mexicans believe was fraudulently deprived of a 1988 presidential election victory, pledges to fight crime and corruption.

1998: Nigeria’s transition to democracy overcomes its first major hurdle with a high turnout and few disturbances marking local government elections.

2000: Lawyers for the first of two Libyans accused in the 1988 Pan Am airliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, launch their defence in the Netherlands.

2003: Ivory Coast rebels back away from immediate disarmament hours after President Laurent Gbagbo announces a start date for the long-awaited plan aimed at securing peace in the West African nation.

2004: Egypt frees an Israeli Arab businessman convicted of spying in exchange for Israel’s release of six Egyptian students, a deal that signals a warming of relations between the two countries.

2005: The first witness to take the stand in the trial of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein recalls mass arrests, tortures and killings.

2006: Fiji military commander Commodore Frank Bainimarama says he had seized control of the country and dismissed the elected prime minister after a stand-off between the two leaders rooted in tension between the South Pacific nation’s indigenous people and its ethnic Indian minority.

2008: The Netherlands’ highest court rules that a peep show owner is eligible to pay sales tax at a lower rate because his establishments are a form of theatre. The government has argued that they are simply strip shows — and thus taxed at a higher rate.

2009: US Marines and Afghan troops kill at least seven Taliban fighters during the first US-led offensive since President Barack Obama announced a new American war plan.

2010: Mexico’s foreign secretary tells the global climate conference there will be “no hidden text and no secret negotiations” in the meeting’s final days, assuring delegates Cancun will not see a repeat of the last hours of 2009’s Copenhagen climate summit.

2011: Seeking to restore confidence in the euro, the leaders of France and Germany jointly call for changes to the European Union treaty so that countries using the euro would face automatic penalties if budget deficits ran too high.

2012: Gunmen loyal to opposite sides in neighbouring Syria’s civil war battle in the streets of the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli where two days of clashes have killed at least six people and wounded more than 50.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

George Armstrong Custer, US general (1839-1876); Fritz Lang, German film director (1890-1976); Walt Disney, US cartoonist-film producer (1901-1966); Werner Heisenberg, German physicist (1901-1976); Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza Debayle, Nicaraguan dictator (1925-1980); Rama IX, Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej (1927-); Little Richard, US singer/pianist (1932-); Joan Didion, US author (1934-)