TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1965: Astronaut Edward White becomes the first American to “walk” in space, during the flight of Gemini 4.

OTHER EVENTS

1621: Dutch West India Company receives a charter for New Netherland — covering parts of what is now New York and nearby states.

1818: The British annex the territories of the Marathas, completing British supremacy in India.

1896: Treaty is signed in Moscow whereby China and Russia form defensive alliance for 15 years, and China grants Russia right to operate railway in northern Manchuria.

1917: Albanian independence under Italian protection is proclaimed.

1937: Britain’s Duke of Windsor, formerly Edward VIII, marries American Wallis Simpson in France after abdicating the throne in December.

1942: Japanese planes raid Dutch Harbour, Alaska, in World War II.

1959: Singapore introduces self-government .

1963: Pope John XXIII dies at age 81, ending a papacy marked by innovative reforms in the Roman Catholic Church. He is succeeded by Pope Paul VI.

1968: Pop artist Andy Warhol is shot and critically wounded in his New York film studio, known as The Factory, by Valerie Solanas, an actress and self-styled feminist.

1969: Australian aircraft carrier Melbourne collides with the US destroyer Harold E Evans in the South China Sea, resulting in the deaths of 74 Americans.

1973: Soviet supersonic airliner crashes during international air show near Paris, killing the six crewmen and seven French villagers.

1976: Bolivia’s former President Juan Jose Torres is found murdered in Argentina.

1981: Pope John Paul II leaves a Rome hospital and returns to the Vatican three weeks after an attempt on his life.

1984: Punjab comes under virtual martial law as troops seal off India’s troubled state and prepare to flush out Sikh terrorists from the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

1989: Chinese troops storm Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators.

1993: A British oil tanker collides in thick fog with a Panamanian cargo ship and bursts into flames, killing seven and spewing tons of burning gasoline into the North Sea.

1995: European and NATO defence ministers agree to form a rapid deployment force in Bosnia to bolster UN troops against attacks by Serb fighters.

1997: Socialist Party leader Lionel Jospin becomes prime minister of France and enters into talks with the Communists about forming a coalition government.

1999: President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia caves in to Western demands to accept allied troops in Kosovo, withdraw his forces and reverse mass expulsions of ethnic Albanians.

2002: Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien fires Finance Minister Paul Martin, the acknowledged front-runner to eventually succeed him. Martin was credited with the country’s economic rebound in the 1990s.

2003: The British House of Commons launches an inquiry into Britain’s use of intelligence information to justify its participation in the US-led war against Iraq.

2004: UN troops open fire upon rampaging mobs, killing two people, as the capture of a city in eastern Congo sparks the largest and most violent protests since before the country’s devastating 1998-2002 war.

2008: Chinese police in Dujiangyan in south-west China drag away more than 100 parents protesting the deaths of their children in poorly constructed schools that collapsed in an earthquake the previous month.

2009: President Barack Obama consults with Saudi King Abdullah on a mission to the Middle East to open a new chapter on Islam and the West and ease long-held grievances against the US.

2010: A Dutch man long suspected in the disappearance of an American teen in Aruba is arrested in the murder of a young woman in Peru.

2012: The River Thames becomes a royal highway as Queen Elizabeth II leads a motley but majestic flotilla of more than 1,000 vessels in a waterborne pageant to mark her Diamond Jubilee.

2013: Turning the screw on Iran and its nuclear programme, the United States imposes new sanctions on Iran’s currency and auto industry, seeking to render Iranian money useless outside the country and to cut off the regime from critical revenue sources.