Today is the 90th day of 2015, There are 275 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1976: New Jersey Supreme Court rules that coma patient Karen Anne Quinlan could be disconnected from her respirator. Quinlan remained comatose and died in 1985.

OTHER EVENTS

1492: King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain issue an edict expelling Jews unwilling to convert to Christianity.

1889: French engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel unfurls the French tricolor from atop the Eiffel Tower, officially marking its completion.

1917: United States takes possession of the Virgin Islands from Denmark.

1923: First US dance marathon, held in New York City, ends with Alma Cummings setting a world record of 27 hours on her feet.

1933: US Congress authorises the Civilian Conservation Corps, providing vocational training and jobs for unemployed young Americans.

1936: Britain and France pledge to support Poland if it is invaded.

1966: Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s Nationalist Party wins election in South Africa.

1968: US President Lyndon Johnson stuns Americans by announcing he would not seek re-election.

1990: Thousands riot against new “poll tax” in central London, leaving 75 civilians and 58 police injured.

1992: UN Security Council votes to ban flights and arms sales to Libya, branding it a terrorist state for shielding six men accused of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and a French airliner over Niger.

1995: Tejano singing star Selena, 23, is shot to death in Corpus Christi, Texas, by founder of her fan club. Yolanda Saldivar is later convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

2000: Japan’s Mount Usu volcano erupts forcing 16,000 people to evacuate the country’s northernmost island.

2003: About 10,000 Bosnian Muslims gather near the town of Potocari to bury the first 600 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. The bodies were among the first remains to be identified among the estimated 8,000 Muslim men and boys executed by Serb forces and hidden in 60 mass graves.

2006: Three strong earthquakes and several aftershocks reduce villages to rubble in western Iran, killing at least 70 people and injuring about 1,200 others.

2007: A U.S. military tribunal sentences Australian David Hicks to nine months in prison, after he pleaded guilty to supporting terrorism, in the first conviction at a US war-crimes trial since World War II.

2008: Chinese President Hu Jintao presides over the re-lighting of the Olympic torch in the host city, Beijing, signalling the start of a round-the-world torch relay that already had become a magnet for protesters.

2009: Benjamin Netanyahu, taking office as Israel’s new leader, promises to seek “full peace” with the Arab and Muslim world, but refuses to utter the words the world was waiting to hear: “Palestinian state.”

2010: A Chechen militant claims responsibility for the deadly attacks on the Moscow subway in an Internet message, hours after two more suicide bombers strike southern Russia in brazen defiance of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

2014: North and South Korea fire hundreds of artillery shells into each other’s waters in a flare-up of animosity.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Rene Descartes, French philosopher (1596-1650); Franz Joseph Haydn, Austrian composer (1732-1809); Nicolai Gogol, Russian author (1809-1852); R W von Bunsen, German chemist (1811-1899); Shirley Jones, US actress (1934- ); Christopher Walken, US actor (1943- ); Ewan McGregor, British actor (1971- )

–AP

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1995: Tejano Singing star Selena, 23, is shot to death on this day, 1995.