Today is the 346th day of 2013. There are 19 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1953: US test pilot Chuck Yeager reaches Mach 2.3 (2.3 times the speed of sound) in a Bell X-1A rocket plane.

OTHER EVENTS

1642: Dutch navigator Abel Tasman discovers New Zealand.

1800: Washington, DC is established as the capital of the United States.

1870: Joseph H Rainey of South Carolina takes his seat in the US House of Representatives, becoming the first black congressman.

1894: Japanese troops invade Korea.

1899: African-American George Grant receives the first patent for a golf tee.

1905: Russia’s Czar Nicholas II grants constitution in Montenegro.

1913: The Mona Lisa is recovered in Italy, two years after it was stolen from the Louvre museum in Paris.

1920: Martial law is declared in Cork, Ireland.

1935: Nationalists demand restitution of Egypt’s Constitution of 1923.

1946: A UN committee votes to accept a six-block tract of Manhattan real estate offered as a gift by John D Rockefeller Jr to be the site of UN headquarters.

1963: Kenya becomes independent within British Commonwealth and a republic a year later.

1969: Greece, under fire on charges of violating human rights, withdraws from the Council of Europe before it can be expelled.

1975: Sara Jane Moore pleads guilty to trying to kill US President Gerald Ford.

1985: An Arrow Air charter flight crashes after takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland, killing 248 American soldiers and eight crew members.

1989: British begin forced repatriation of Vietnamese refugees from camps in Hong Kong.

1992: A strong earthquake kills 2,500 people on Flores Island, eastern Indonesia.

1993: President Boris Yeltsin wins approval of his new constitution, but extreme nationalists and Communists make a strong showing in Russia’s first multiparty elections since the 1917 Revolution.

1994: The Brazilian supreme court acquits former President Fernando Collor de Mello of corruption charges.

1997: Russia reaches an agreement with the International Monetary Fund for $1.7 billion in loans, giving the state a chance to pay back wages to millions of public employees.

1999: A Maltese-registered tanker, the Erika, breaks in two during a violent sea storm off the northwest coast of France, spilling some 3 million gallons (11.4 million litres) of heavy oil.

2000: The US Supreme Court reverses the Florida Supreme Court’s order to begin manual recounts of presidential votes in certain counties and Democrat Al Gore concedes defeat to Republican George W Bush.

2003: Germany says it will build a national memorial to homosexuals persecuted or killed under the Nazis, complementing the planned German memorial to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.

2006: Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, known as “the butcher of Addis Ababa,” is convicted of genocide in a rare case of an African strongman being held to account by his own country.

2007: A car bomb attack kills one of Lebanon’s top generals, Brigadier General Francois Hajj, and his driver. The blast was the first such attack against the Lebanese army, which has remained neutral in Lebanon’s year-long political crisis.

2008: A British jury decides that a string of police failures caused the death of a Brazilian electrician shot by anti-terror police on July 22, after being mistaken for a suicide bomber.

2009: Emails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled sceptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages do not support claims that the science of global warming was faked.

2010: Israel’s leader dismisses a call from a key government partner to share the holy city of Jerusalem with the Palestinians, a reminder of the obstacles facing already troubled peace-making efforts.

2011: Convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal says he is surprised and somewhat disappointed that he did not get a new sentencing hearing in the racially charged US murder case that had kept him on death row for nearly 30 years.

2012: North Korea successfully launches its first satellite into space, heightening concerns it has moved one step closer to being capable of lobbing nuclear bombs over the Pacific.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

John Jay, US revolutionary, diplomat, Supreme Court Justice (1745-1829); Gustave Flaubert, French author (1821-1880); Edvard Munch, Norwegian artist (1863-1944); John Osborne, English playwright (1929-1994); Frank Sinatra, US singer/actor (1915-1998); Bob Barker, US game show host (1923-); Jennifer Connelly, US actress (1970-)

— AP