TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1949: The Berlin Airlift, which delivered two million metric tons (2.3 million tons) of food and fuel to West Berliners while circumventing a Soviet blockade, comes to an end.

OTHER EVENTS

1399: King Richard II of England abdicates in favour of Henry Bolingbroke, who led a rebellion of noblemen against him.

1568: John III is proclaimed king of Sweden by the nobility after the deposition of Eric XIV.

1787: Sailing ship Columbia leaves Boston on first voyage around the world by American vessel.

1791: Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute premieres in Vienna, Austria.

1846: Dentist William Morton uses ether as an anaesthetic for the first time on a patient in his Boston office.

1868: Spain’s Queen Isabella flees to France and is declared deposed.

1938: Britain, France, Germany and Italy agree at the Munich conference to transfer the Czech Sudetenland to Germany while remaining frontiers of Czechoslovakia are guaranteed.

1942: The Nazis advance in Stalingrad, Russia. Some 990 Russian planes are destroyed against 77 German losses.

1946: International military tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, finds 22 top German Nazi leaders guilty of war crimes. Eleven are sentenced to death.

1954: The first atomic-powered vessel, the submarine Nautilus, is commissioned by the US Navy.

1962: Black American student James Meredith succeeds on his fourth try to register for classes at the University of Mississippi.

1965: Six of Indonesia’s top army generals are kidnapped and killed in an abortive coup. Turmoil ensues, leading to the deaths of 300,000 communists and President Sukarno being replaced by General Suharto.

1966: Republic of Botswana gains independence from Britain.

1971: United States and Soviet Union sign pacts designed to avoid accidental nuclear war.

1978: Scores of people, mostly civilians, are reported killed around Beirut in renewed fighting between Lebanese Christians and Syrian peacekeeping troops.

1984: Egyptian court sentences 107 Muslim extremists to prison for attempting to set up Islamic regime after 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat.

1986: The United States releases accused Soviet spy Gennadiy Zakharov, after the Soviets release US journalist Nicholas Daniloff, whom the KGB accused of espionage.

1990: Soviet Union and South Korea open full diplomatic relations.

1991: Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is ousted by the army.

1993: An earthquake rocks south-western India, leaving more than 10,000 dead, 67 villages flattened and 120,000 homeless.

1994: Saudi Arabia and five smaller Arab countries announce a partial lifting of their economic boycott of Israel.

1995: Blind Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine other Islamic militants are convicted in New York for a plot to blow up New York City landmarks, including the United Nations.

2005: A white farmer in South Africa is sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a former black worker who was attacked with machetes, then tied up and thrown in a lion enclosure.

2007: Rebel forces storm an African Union base in Darfur, killing and wounding dozens of peacekeepers in the worst attack on the organisation since the conflict began in western Sudan.

2011: President Barack Obama steers the US military machine into uncharted territory when a US drone attacks a convoy in Yemen and kills two American citizens who had become central figures in al-Qaeda.

2013: Fourteen car bombs targeting Shiite neighbourhoods in Baghdad leave 54 people dead.

2014: Hong Kong’s leader refuses to meet with pro-democracy demonstrators despite their threats to expand street protests that have posed the stiffest challenge to Beijing’s authority since China took control of the former British colony in 1997.