TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2003: A 56-year-old man ignites a container of flammable liquid inside a subway train in Taegu, South Korea, starting a blaze that engulfs two trains, killing at least 133 people.

OTHER EVENTS

1685: La Salle, French explorer, establishes first settlement on American soil in Texas.

1861: Jefferson Davis is sworn in as president of the secessionist Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama.

1885: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published in the United States.

1930: American astronomer Clyde W Tombaugh discovers the planet Pluto.

1945: Battle for Iwo Jima begins in Pacific in World War II.

1953: Bwana Devil, the movie that heralded the 3-D fad of the 1950s, opens in New York City.

1964: Earthquakes rock Azores in eastern Atlantic, and ships battle high waves to evacuate people from San Jorge Island.

1977: The space shuttle Enterprise, sitting atop a Boeing 747, goes on its maiden flight above the Mojave Desert.

1988: Boris Yeltsin is ousted from ruling Communist Party Politburo in Moscow.

1992: Libya produces two men accused of blowing up an American jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, but insists they’ll never go to trial in the West.

1993: UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali rebukes a top official for suspending relief shipments to eastern Bosnia and Sarajevo, and orders the aid deliveries resumed.

2001: Veteran FBI agent Robert Philip Hanssen is arrested on charges of spying for Russia for more than 15 years.

2002: Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, the Russian navy’s commander in chief, discloses that the Kursk, a nuclear-powered submarine that sank in the Barents Sea in August 2000, had been loaded with obsolete torpedoes that contained unstable fuel.

2004: Runaway train cars carrying a lethal mix of fuel and chemicals derail, catch fire and then explode hours later in north-east Iran, killing more than 200 people, injuring at least 400 and leaving dozens trapped beneath crumbled mud homes.

2006: Muslim protesters attack Christians and burn churches when a march against cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad turns violent in north-eastern Nigeria, killing at least 15 people in the first major protest to erupt over the issue in Africa’s most populous nation.

2008: Pakistan’s opposition parties win a parliamentary majority, threatening the rule of President Pervez Musharraf, a key American ally in the fight against terrorism.

2009: French President Nicolas Sarkozy pledges to spend euro 2.6 billion on measures to soften the blow of the global financial crisis on France’s most vulnerable citizens.

2011: The United States vetoes a UN resolution that would have condemned “illegal” Israeli settlements and demanded an immediate halt to all settlement building, a move certain to anger Arab countries and Palestinian supporters around the world.

2012: Diplomats say Iran is poised to greatly expand uranium enrichment at a fortified underground bunker to a point that would boost how quickly it could make nuclear warheads.

2013: President Hugo Chavez returns to Venezuela after more than two months of treatment in Cuba following cancer surgery, triggering street celebrations by supporters while he remains out of sight at a military hospital.