Today is the 225th day of 2014. There are 140 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1990: President Mikhail S Gorbachev issues a decree absolving of wrongdoing the millions of victims of Soviet leader Josef Stalin who had not been formally rehabilitated.

OTHER EVENTS

1521: Spaniard Hernando Cortes captures Tenochtitlan, completing the defeat of the Aztec Empire.

1784: Britain’s India Act places East India Company under government-appointed Board of Control.

1792: French revolutionaries imprison France’s royal family.

1814: Britain agrees to hand back all Dutch colonial possessions including Indonesia.

1937: Japanese attack Chinese city of Shanghai.

1945: World Zionist Congress demands admission of 1 million Jews to Palestine.

1961: East Germany seals off border between East and West Berlin, closing Brandenburg Gate to halt people fleeing the country.

1970: Iraq and Syria reaffirm their opposition to Egyptian efforts to seek a peaceful solution of the Middle East crisis.

1976: South Africa pledges support for US effort to bring about negotiated settlement in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), saying failure would invite communist intervention.

1978: Explosion in Palestinian building in Beirut kills about 200 people, including members of the Palestine Liberation OrganiSation.

1983: The Indian Government starts to erect a barbed-wire fence along the entire 2,500-mile (4,000-kilometere) border with Bangladesh to prevent the entry of illegal aliens. Resentment of Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh flares into weeks of violence in which 3,000 were killed.

1993: A six-storey hotel in Thailand crashes down, killing at least 24 people, injuring about 350, and trapping dozens in the debris.

1994: Bosnian Serb leaders rebuff a top UN official’s plea to accept an international peace plan that would give them 49 per cent of Bosnia.

1995: Decapitated body of a Norwegian man, one of the five tourists kidnapped by a Kashmiri separatist group, is found in a village in India.

1997: Heavy fighting rages in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, between forces of the president and those of a former military ruler.

1998: Rebels fighting Congolese President Laurent Kabila capture a power transformer in western Congo, sending the capital, Kinshasa, into darkness.

2001: Macedonia’s rival political leaders sign a landmark peace accord aimed at ending six months of bloody conflicts and clearing the way for NATO troops to disarm ethnic Albanian rebels.

2002: Iranian President Mohammed Khatami criticizes the US campaign against terrorism, saying Washington “misused” worldwide outrage over the September 11 attacks in order to “use the fight against terrorism to impose its power on other countries”.

2003: Libya and families of victims of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, sign an agreement to pay as much as $2.7 billion in reparations. The agreement also called for Libya to acknowledge responsibility for the bombing.

2006: On his 80th birthday, Fidel Castro cautions Cubans that he faces a long recovery from surgery. His younger brother, Raul, makes a first public appearance as Cuba’s interim president.

2007: Two South Korean women kidnapped by Taliban militants in mid-July are handed over to the International Red Cross.

2008: Mexico announces it will build a US$1.27-billion tunnel that will be almost 39 miles (62 kilometres) long and 7 yards (metres) in diameter, to help solve the centuries-old drainage problem of the nation’s capital.

2009: Helicopter gunships pummel a key Taliban commander’s bases in Pakistan’s northwest, killing at least 12 insurgents as government forces ratchet up pressure on the militants following their top leader’s reported death.

2011: Libyan rebels fight their way into the strategic city of Zawiya west of Tripoli in their most significant advance in months, battling snipers on rooftops and heavy shelling from Moammar Gadhafi’s forces holding the city.

2012: Russia’s Foreign Ministry harshly criticiSes new US sanctions on Iran, calling them “‘undisguised blackmail” and warning that relations between Moscow and Washington would suffer if Russian companies are affected.

2013: Israel releases 26 Palestinians inmates, including many convicted in grisly killings, on the eve of renewed Mideast peace negotiations, angering families of those slain by the prisoners who are welcomed as heroes in the West Bank and Gaza.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Andes Angstroem, Swedish physicist (1814-1874); Albert Sorel, French historian (1824-1906); John Logie Baird, British inventor of television (1888-1946); Alfred Hitchcock, British film director (1899-1980); Makarios III, first president of Cyprus (1913-1977); Fidel Castro, Cuban leader (1926- ); Kathleen Battle, US soprano (1948- ); Paul Greengrass, film director (1955- )

–AP

CAP: Fidel Castro celebrates his brthday today.