Today is the 80th day of 2014. There are 285 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2002: Pope John Paul II releases his first statement addressing the large number of recent cases of sexual abuse of minors by members of the Roman Catholic clergy. He denounces the priests saying they betrayed their vows and succumbed to evil.

OTHER EVENTS

1500: French garrison in Novara, Italy, capitulates to forces of Ludovico Sforza of Milan.

1829: Earthquake in Spain kills 6,000.

1871: Journalist Henry M Stanley begins his famous expedition to Africa to locate the missing Scottish missionary David Livingstone.

1884: France legalizes trade unions.

1919: Soviet Republic is proclaimed.

1945: After bombing the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, British RAF planes mistakenly bomb the French School killing 86 children and 10 nuns.

1946: The United Nations sets up temporary headquarters at Hunter College in New York City.

1953: Sudan achieves self-government.

1960: Pan-African demonstrations against laws in South Africa leads to shooting and killing 60 blacks in Sharpeville. A state of emergency is declared.

1963: Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay is emptied of its last inmates at the order of Attorney General Robert F Kennedy.

1965: More than 3,000 civil rights demonstrators led by the Rev Martin Luther King Jr begin a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

1975: Military government in Ethiopia abolishes royal position of Emperor.

1977: India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi resigns after losing her seat in parliamentary elections.

1985: Police in Langa, South Africa, open fire on black protesters marching to mark the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville shootings, killing at least 21 demonstrators.

1997: US President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin hold summit in Helsinki, Finland, and agree to slash their nuclear arsenals.

1999: Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov escapes an assassination attempt when a remote-controlled mine explodes near his motorcade. One person is killed and eight are injured.

2003: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), set up in 1995 to investigate human rights abuses during the apartheid system of white-minority rule, urges the Government to pay $270 million (euro201.25 million) to some 20,000 victims who testified about atrocities suffered under apartheid.

2005: Secretary General Kofi Annan unveils a plan to overhaul the United Nations and immediately begins the task of selling his vision to all 191 UN member states, urging them to make the proposals a reality when they meet again in six months.

2007: Somali insurgents drag the corpses of four Somali soldiers and two of their Ethiopian allies through the streets of Mogadishu and set the bodies on fire, drawing crowds who throw stones and kick the bodies as violence rages throughout the capital.

2011: Officials race to restore electricity to Japan’s leaking nuclear plant, but getting the power flowing will hardly be the end of their battle: With its mangled machinery and partly melted reactor cores, bringing the complex under control is a monstrous job.

2012: Britain’s finance minister cuts the rate of income tax for the country’s wealthiest citizens but imposes a raft of measures to prevent tax avoidance and a hefty new charge on expensive property sales in an attempt to spread the burden of austerity across the UK’s taxpayers.

2013: A suicide bombing tears through a mosque in the Syrian capital, killing a top Sunni Muslim preacher and longtime supporter of President Bashar Assad along with at least 41 other people.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Johann Sebastian Bach, German composer (1685-1750); Frederick Richter (Jean Paul), German author (1763-1825); Benito Juarez, Mexican president (1806-1872); King Ghazi of Iraq (1912-1939); Timothy Dalton, Welsh actor (1944-); Gary Oldman, US actor (1958-); Rosie O’Donnell, US comedian/former talk show host (1962-)

–AP