Today is the 36th day of 2016. There are 330 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2010: Toyota’s president emerges from seclusion to apologise and address criticism that the automaker mishandled a crisis over sticking gas pedals. Yet he stops short of ordering a recall for the company’s Prius hybrid for braking problems.

OTHER EVENTS

1811: British Regency Act is passed, whereby the Prince of Wales becomes Prince Regent during King George III’s temporary insanity.

1917: Mexico becomes a federated republic of 28 states; US Congress passes, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, a law severely curtailing the immigration of Asians.

1958: Gamel Abdel Nasser is formally nominated to become the first president of the new United Arab Republic, the union of Egypt and Syria.

1962: France’s President Charles de Gaulle calls for independence for Algeria on basis of friendly cooperation with France.

1971: US Apollo 14 astronauts land on Moon.

1976: Earthquake in Guatemala takes almost 23,000 lives.

1989: Algeria’s president proposes new national constitution, dropping references to socialism and opening door to multiparty system.

1990: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, addressing the party plenum, says the Communist Party must abandon its monopoly on power.

1991: Iraq, under attack by the US and its allies, suspends fuel sales to its citizens.

1992: UN declines deployment of 10,000-man UN peacekeeping force in Yugoslavia.

1993: Up to 200 Somali youths hurl rocks at US forces and set tire barricades ablaze in the belief that American troops shot to death a Somali man.

1994: A single mortar shell kills 68 people in a Sarajevo marketplace; White separatist Byron de la Beckwith is convicted in Jackson, Mississippi, for murdering civil rights leader Medgar Evers, three decades earlier.

1995: Peru and Ecuador break off ceasefire talks and fighting flares again along their disputed jungle border.

1997: Three Swiss banking giants announce they will contribute US$71 million to open a humanitarian fund for Holocaust victims.

1998: More than 600,000 plantation workers in Sri Lanka go on strike for higher wages, crippling key sectors of the country’s economy. They return to work ten days later.

1999: The 80-year-old President Nelson Mandela of South Africa delivers his last major address to Parliament.

2001: Four men go on trial in New York in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa, which killed 224 people.

2002: Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel apologises for his country’s role in the 1961 assassination of then-Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. He offers a US$3.25-million fund in Lumumba’s name to promote democracy in Congo.

2003: North Korea announces its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon has resumed operations. North Korea in December 2002 declared its intention to reopen the facility, as part of a series of announced moves to resume its nuclear programmes, which it had agreed to suspend in 1994.

2009: As US Navy ships look on, Somali pirates speed away with $3.2 million in ransom after releasing an arms-laden Ukrainian freighter ending a four-month stand-off that focused world attention on piracy off Somalia’s lawless coast.

2014: The Vatican “systematically” adopted policies that allowed priests to rape and molest thousands of children over decades, a UN human rights committee says, urging the Holy See to open its files on paedophiles and bishops who concealed their crimes.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Sir Robert Peel, English statesman after whom British police are called “Bobbies” (1788-1850); Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Finnish national poet (1804-1877); John Lindley, English botanist (1799-1865); William S Burroughs, US writer (1914-1997); Andreas Papandreou, Greek prime minister (1919-1996); Jennifer Jason Leigh, US actress (1962-); Bobby Brown, US singer (1969-); Laura Linney, US actress (1964-)

— AP