TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1991: Basketball star Magic Johnson announces he has tested positive for the AIDS virus and will retire.

OTHER EVENTS

1659: Peace of the Pyrenees is reached between Spain and France.

1916: Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana becomes the first woman elected to the US Congress.

1917: Bolsheviks seize the Winter Palace in St Petersburg during the October Revolution. According to the Julian calendar, still in use in Russia, the date was October 25.

1919: Socialists depose the king of Bavaria, ending the rule of one of Europe’s oldest dynasties, and proclaim a republic.

1944: US President Franklin D Roosevelt wins an unprecedented fourth term in office, defeating Thomas E Dewey.

1950: The king of Nepal is deposed by the state’s hereditary prime minister. The king’s three-year-old grandson, Prince Gyanendra, is installed as ruler. The deposed king favoured demands for increased popular government in the nation, which is ruled by the prime minister.

1956: British and French declare a ceasefire in Egypt, but Britain says it will evacuate troops only on arrival of UN Emergency Force.

1966: Chinese diplomats walk out of the Bolshevik Anniversary celebration in Moscow after hearing Soviet criticism of Chinese Government.

1967: Carl Stokes is elected the first black mayor of a major city — Cleveland, Ohio.

1972: Richard M Nixon is re-elected as US president.

1973: United States and Egypt announce they will resume diplomatic relations and exchange ambassadors; Congress overrides US President Richard M Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Act, which limits a chief executive’s power to wage war without congressional approval.

1987: Tunisia’s President Habib Bourguiba is removed from office by his prime minister who says the 84-year-old leader is senile.

1988: Powerful earthquake just inside China’s mountainous southern border kills 600 people.

1989: Multiparty elections held in Namibia under a UN peace plan is a step toward independence; David N Dinkins is elected New York City’s first black mayor.

1990: Shots are fired near Mikhail Gorbachev during Soviet Union’s Revolution Day parade; Irish voters elect a radical feminist to presidency.

1992: King Hussein of Jordan tells Iraqis it is time to put an end to the government of Saddam Hussein.

1993: Palestinian gunmen fire on a rabbi’s car and Jewish settlers in the occupied territories riot.

1994: The former head of a Bosnian Serb concentration camp becomes the first to be charged with war crimes after World War II when the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague issues its first indictment.

1995: Three American servicemen plead guilty to raping a 12-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl. The attack outrages the Japanese and strains ties between Japan and the United States.

1996: A Nigerian airliner carrying 141 people crashes into swampland east of Lagos, killing all aboard.

1997: Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi signs a package of reforms aimed at making Kenya a multiparty democracy.

1998: Colombian soldiers pull out from a region the size of Switzerland, the Government’s boldest concession to rebels in 34 years of civil war.

1999: On the eve of final status talks with the Palestinians, three pipe bombs explode in an Israeli beach town and wound 33 people.

2000: Americans choose Republican George W Bush as president over Democratic Vice- President Al Gore by 537 votes. The results of the election were not known for more than a month because of a dispute over the vote count in Florida.

2001: Opposition forces claim another victory against the Taliban in northern Afghanistan as some of their forces advance to just 13 kilometres (eight miles) outside the strategic city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

2004: Egypt denies it has a secret nuclear weapons programme in an angry response to reports that the UN atomic watchdog agency is investigating the discovery of plutonium particles near an Egyptian nuclear facility.

2005: Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori is arrested in Chile on charges involving corruption and massacres as he returns home to run for re-election after five years as a protected exile in Japan. Fujimori, target of an international arrest warrant, faces extradition to Peru.

2006: Tajikistan’s authoritarian president Emomali Rakhmonov wins a new seven-year term in an election that foreign observers say lacked any genuine competition.

2007: More than 30 surgeons in southern India complete a gruelling 24-hour operation on Lakshmi, a two-year-old girl born with four arms and four legs. Doctors remove her extra limbs, salvage her organs and rebuild her pelvis area.

2008: An environmentalist group and four Nigerians file suit against Royal Dutch Shell PLC in the Netherlands, claiming the company was negligent in cleaning up oil spills in Nigeria.

2009: Lebanon’s Syrian-backed factions finally agree on a unity government proposed by their pro-Western rivals, ending a four-month deadlock in the deeply divided country.

2011: Michael Jackson’s doctor is convicted of involuntary manslaughter after a trial that painted him as a reckless caregiver who administered a lethal dose of a powerful anaesthetic that killed the pop star.

2012: Britain calls on the United States and other allies to do more to shape the Syrian opposition into a coherent force, saying the re-election of President Barack Obama is an opportunity for the world to take stronger action to end the Arab country’s deadly civil war.

2013: Yasser Arafat’s mysterious death in 2004 turns into a whodunit after Swiss scientists who examined his remains say the Palestinian leader was probably poisoned with radioactive polonium.