Today is the 149th day of 2014. There are 216 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1991: The Yugoslav republic of Croatia declares itself “an independent state” and formally secedes from Yugoslavia a month later.

OTHER EVENTS

1453: Turks capture Constantinople, capital of Byzantine Empire. Some historians list date as end of Middle Ages.

1692: British fleet defeats French Navy at La Hogue, ending attempted invasion of England.

1903: King Aleksander Obrenovic of Serbia and his wife Draga Masin are assassinated by his officers and guards. Karadjordjevic dynasty takes over the throne.

1932: World War I veterans begin arriving in Washington to demand cash bonuses they weren’t scheduled to receive for another 13 years.

1942: Bing Crosby, the Ken Darby Singers and the John Scott Trotter Orchestra record Irving Berlin’s White Christmas in Los Angeles for Decca Records.

1943: Americans defeat Japanese in Battle of Attu in Aleutian Islands in World War II.

1947: Constituent Assembly in India outlaws “untouchability”, a system of social ostracism practised against people of lower classes.

1953: Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tensing Norgay of Nepal become first to reach top of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain.

1966: Buddhist nun burns herself to death outside a pagoda in the South Vietnamese city of Hue to protest country’s military government.

1972: US President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sign declaration pledging era of peaceful coexistence between the United States and Soviet Union.

1973: Tom Bradley is elected the first black mayor of Los Angeles, defeating incumbent Sam Yorty.

1990: Boris Yeltsin is elected president of Russia, largest of Soviet Union’s 15 republics.

1994: The former Communist party wins a majority in the second free Hungarian elections since the Communist government fell in 1989.

1995: Bosnian Serbs upgrade their arsenal with armoured vehicles from the UN troops they took hostage after the first major NATO airstrike against them.

1997: Angolan authorities announce that government troops have overrun large parts of northern Angola, previously controlled by the rebel movement Unita.

1998: President Boris Yeltsin’s announces a crackdown on Russia’s millions of tax cheaters as part of a strategy to fill the government’s empty coffers.

2000: Ethiopia’s warplanes bomb a military airstrip on the outskirts of Asmara, taking its two-week-old offensive to the Eritrean capital on what was to be the opening day of peace talks.

2001: The Japanese Red Army, responsible for terrorist massacres in Israel and Italy, announces that it will disband after nearly four decades and regroup as a “legal” organisation.

2005: French voters reject the European Union’s proposed constitution, dealing a staggering blow to efforts to further unify the 25-nation bloc by giving it a common charter and more power on the global stage.

2007: President George W Bush chooses Robert Zoellick, a one-time US trade representative and former No 2 official at the State Department, to lead the World Bank.

2008: The Vatican firmly rejects attempts by women to become priests in the Roman Catholic Church, reiterating in a decree that anyone involved in ordination ceremonies is automatically excommunicated.

2012: The biggest scandal to rock the Vatican in decades widens with the pope’s butler, arrested for allegedly having confidential documents in his home, agreeing to cooperate with investigators, raising spectre that higher-ranking ecclesial heads may roll.TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

John F Kennedy, US president (1917-1963); Bob Hope, US comedian-actor (1903-2003); Andre Brink, South African writer

(1935-); LaToya Jackson, US singer (1956-); Rupert Everett, actor (1959-); Annette Bening, US actress (1958-); Melissa Etheridge, US rock singer (1961-).

— AP