Today is the 110th day of 2015. There are 255 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2004: A Panamanian court sentences five Cuban exiles, who had been accused of plotting to kill Fidel Castro, to between seven and eight years in prison. The men were arrested after Castro announced a plot to kill him during an Ibero-American summit to Panama in November 2000.

OTHER EVENTS

1534: Elizabeth Barton, the Maid of Kent, is executed in England with five of her associates for criticising the matrimonial practices of Henry VIII.

1792: France declares war on Austria, marking the start of the French Revolutionary wars.

1902: Scientists Marie and Pierre Curie isolate the radioactive element radium.

1945: Soviet forces penetrate Berlin defences in World War II.

1968: Pierre Elliott Trudeau is sworn in as Canada’s prime minister.

1970: US President Richard Nixon announces withdrawal of 150,000 American military personnel from South Vietnam.

1971: US Supreme Court upholds the use of busing students to achieve racial desegregation in schools.

1972: US Apollo 16 astronauts make safe landing on Moon.

1976: The US Supreme Court rules that federal courts could order low-cost housing for minorities in white urban suburbs.

1978: Soviet fighter planes force off-course South Korean airliner down in Soviet Union near Arctic Circle.

1980: The first Cubans sailing to the United States as part of the massive Mariel boatlift reach Florida.

1986: Giant irrigation reservoir bursts and floods Sri Lanka town, leaving at least 100 people dead and up to 20,000 families homeless.

1987: PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat calls for sovereign Palestinian state “with Jerusalem as its capital”.

1990: Lech Walesa is re-elected as chairman of Poland’s Solidarity by a large margin.

1993: Heavy fighting between Croat and Muslim troops spreads from central to south-western Bosnia on the fifth day of a battle that has killed more than 200 people.

1997: In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu escapes political disaster when prosecutors decide not to indict him in an influence-peddling scandal.

1999: The worst in a rash of school shootings in the United States kills 15 people, including the two student gunmen, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

2001: An American missionary and her infant daughter are killed when their single-engine plane is shot down by the Peruvian air force. The plane was operating without a flight plan in airspace frequented by drug runners.

2005: Ecuador’s Congress removes embattled President Lucio Gutierrez from office after a week of escalating street protests against him and swears in Vice-President Alfredo Palacio as the country’s new leader.

2008: Pope Benedict XVI begins the final day of his US journey by blessing the site of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and praying for peace.

2009: Dozens of Western diplomats walk out of a UN conference in Geneva when Iran’s hard-line president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls Israel a cruel and racist state and the US denounces his remarks as hateful.

2010: Europe’s busiest airports reopen as air traffic across the continent lurches back to life. But the gridlock created by Iceland’s volcanic ash plume is far from over: Officials say it will be weeks before all stranded travellers can be brought home.

2011: The top US military officer accuses Pakistan’s spy agency of links to a powerful militant faction fighting in Afghanistan, and says that relationship was at the “heart” of tensions between Islamabad and Washington.

2013: A powerful earthquake strikes the steep hills of China’s south-western Sichuan province, leaving at least 160 people dead.

2014: A non-profit research group says political and military elites are seizing protected areas in one of Africa’s last bastions for elephants, putting broad swathes of Zimbabwe at risk of becoming fronts for ivory poaching.

–AP