Today is the 265th day of 2017. There are 100 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1989: F W De Klerk takes over as president of South Africa.

OTHER EVENTS

1609: The king of Spain orders the deportation of the baptised former Muslims known as Moriscos.

1792: French Republic is proclaimed and revolutionary calendar goes into effect.

1862: US President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in the Confederate States free as of January 1, 1863.

1914: A German submarine sinks three British cruisers in one hour off the Dutch coast; the German cruiser Emden shells Madras in India.

1927: Slavery is abolished in Sierra Leone in Africa.

1949: The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb.

1955: Hurricane Janet, the most violent Caribbean hurricane of the season, causes almost 600 deaths around the islands.

1965: A ceasefire is declared in the war between India and Pakistan, but both sides subsequently violate it.

1974: Official death toll in hurricane that swept Honduras is put at 5,000.

1975: Sara Jane Moore fails in an attempt to shoot US President Gerald Ford outside a San Francisco hotel.

1980: Iraqi tanks enter Iran, marking the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War as a full-scale conflict.

1986: Two hijackers seize a Soviet airliner at Ural Mountains airport and kill two passengers before security agents recapture plane and shoot the hijackers.

1988: The Government of Canada apologises for the World War II internment of Japanese-Canadians and promises compensation.

1990: Jordan’s King Hussein appeals to United States in televised message to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia to avert “death, destruction and misery”.

1992: Azerbaijani armed forces mount an offensive against the disputed enclave Nagorno-Karabakh.

1993: Abkhazian rebels in Georgia shoot down second passenger plane in two days, killing 80.

1994: NATO aircraft strike at Serbian targets near Sarajevo after UN troops patrolling the city came under machine-gun and rocket fire.

1995: America’s Time Warner Inc and Turner Broadcasting System Inc announce a merger with Time Warner purchasing TBS in a deal valued at $7.5 billion, creating the world’s largest media company.

2001: Pope John Paul II visits Kazakhstan and Armenia, and cautions against allowing September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States to create divisions between Muslims and Christians.

2004: The US military drops an espionage charge against a Muslim interpreter accused of spying at the camp for terror detainees at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It is the third Guantanamo spy case of the year to fall apart.

2006: Pope Benedict XVI invites Muslim envoys to meet with him at his summer residence for what the Holy See says is urgently needed dialogue following a crisis ignited by his remarks on Islam and violence.

2007: Monks leading swelling demonstrations against Myanmar’s military regime march past barricades to the home of Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, increasing pressure on the junta.

2008: The first excavation of Stonehenge in more than 40 years has uncovered evidence that the stone circle drew ailing pilgrims from around Europe for what they believed to be its healing properties, archaeologists say.

2009: Al-Qaeda releases a new 106-minute-long video predicting President Barack Obama’s downfall at the hands of the Muslim world to mark the 8th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the US.

2010: Declassified US documents show former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, a prominent member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, told the FBI that the dictator “delighted” in the 1998 terrorist bombings of two US embassies in East Africa, but had no interest in partnering with Osama bin Laden.

2011: American diplomats lead a walkout at the UN General Assembly as Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fiercely attacks the United States and major West European nations as “arrogant powers” ruled by greed and eager for military adventurism.

2012: The leaders of the rebel Free Syrian Army say they moved their command centre from Turkey to Syria with the aim of uniting rebels and speeding up the fall of President Bashar Assad’s regime.

2013: A pair of suicide bombers blow themselves up amid hundreds of worshippers at a historic church in north-western Pakistan, killing 78 people in the deadliest-ever attack against the country’s Christian minority.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Michael Faraday, British physicist (1791-1862); Caroline Astor, US aristocrat of New York high society (1830-1908); Erich von Stroheim, German director and actor (1885-1957); Louis Botha, South African soldier statesman (1862-1919); John Houseman, US stage/radio actor (1902-1988); Fay Weldon, British writer (1931- ); Andrea Bocelli, Italian opera singer (1958- ); Joan Jett, US rock singer (1960- )