TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1999: Five-year-old Elian Gonzalez is rescued at sea after a boat capsizes during a voyage from Cuba, killing his mother and 10 others. Elian is turned over to his Miami relatives, but his Cuban father demands the boy’s return and a highly politicised custody battle rages for seven months.

OTHER EVENTS

1917: A plebiscite approves separation of state and church in Uruguay; Russia holds its last free election for more than half- a-century.

1942: A special Moscow communique reports 15,000 more Germans are captured and 6,000 are killed, raising the total in the seven-day Stalingrad offensive to 51,000 captured and 47,000 killed.

1952: The world’s longest-running play, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, opens in London.

1973: Greece’s President George Papadopoulos is ousted in a bloodless military coup.

1975: Netherlands grants Suriname its independence.

1977: UN General Assembly condemns Israel for occupation of Arab lands.

1981: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak frees 31 journalists and political figures, including five former Cabinet officials, who were arrested in Anwar el-Sadat’s crackdown on political opposition in September.

1986: The Iran-Contra affair erupts as US President Ronald Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese reveal that profits from secret arms sales to Iran had been diverted to Nicaraguan rebels.

1988: Radical students and Buddhist monks battle riot police in Seoul, South Korea, demanding arrest of former President Chun Doo Hwan for corruption.

1991: President Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to hold the Soviet Union together suffer a setback when seven republics fail to initial the proposed Union Treaty as scheduled.

1992: Representatives of 93 nations agree to speed efforts to phase out the production and use of chemicals that damage the Earth’s ozone layer. Under the agreement, industrialised nations will move up their deadlines for eliminating some harmful chemicals.

1994: Guerrillas loyal to Yasser Arafat fight Palestine Liberation Organisation dissidents in Lebanon’s largest refugee camp.

1995: In Warsaw, Poland’s President-elect Aleksander Kwasniewski resigns from the former communist party in a bid to be seen as a leader above politics.

1996: More than 100,000 people march through Belgrade, Yugoslavia, accusing Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic of stealing municipal elections.

1997: A former member of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s entourage testifies before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he saw her stab a young activist to death.

1998: President Jiang Zemin arrives in Tokyo for the first visit to Japan by a Chinese head of state since World War II.

2000: Russia introduces a plan for a state monopoly on caviar production and exports, a move that would cut off illegal sales to the luxury market abroad and increase revenues coming into the government’s coffers.

2005: An Austrian court rules that British historian David Irving must remain in custody on Holocaust denial charges despite his assertion that he now acknowledges the existence of Nazi-era gas chambers.

2006: Lebanon’s US-backed government approves the creation of an international tribunal to try suspects in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

2007: Pakistan’s exiled former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif returns home to a hero’s welcome and calls on President General Pervez Musharraf to end emergency rule before elections.

2012: Fire races through a garment factory in Bangladesh that supplies major retailers in the West, killing at least 112 people, many of whom were trapped by the flames because the eight-storey building lacked emergency exits.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Lope Felix de Vega, Spanish dramatist (1562-1635); Joe DiMaggio, former US baseball player (1914-1999); Ricardo Montalban, Mexican-born actor (1920-2009); Mauno Koivisto, Finland’s president from 1982 to 1994 (1923- ); Amy Grant, US singer (1960- ); Christina Applegate, US actress (1971- )

— AP