Today is the 276th day of 2017. There are 89 days left in the year

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS

1990: East and West Germany are united.

OTHER EVENTS

1226: St Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order, dies.

1789: US President George Washington proclaims the first US national Thanksgiving Day; observed Nov 26 in honour of the adoption of the US Constitution.

1824: A republican constitution is adopted in Mexico, until then an empire.

1866: Italy and Austria sign a peace treaty in which Austria surrenders Venice and the surrounding region to Italy.

1899: Settlement of British Guiana-Venezuela boundary dispute.

1922: Rebecca L Felton, a Democrat from Georgia, becomes the first woman to be in the US Senate. She was appointed to serve out the remaining term of Senator Thomas E Watson.

1929: Name of Serbo-Croat-Slovene Kingdom is changed to Yugoslavia.

1941: Germany’s Adolf Hitler announces the Soviet Union has been defeated and never will rise again.

1942: President Franklin D Roosevelt establishes the Office of Economic Stabilization and authorises controls on farm prices, rents, wages and salaries.

1944: US troops crack the Siegfried Line north of Aachen, Germany, during World War II.

1954: Foreign ministers of seven West European nations, the United States and Canada agree to allow West Germany to join NATO.

1963: The Honduran armed forces oust Ramon Villeda Morales as president in a violent coup d’etat.

1968: Leftist military coup in Peru ousts President Fernando Balaunde Terry and imposes sweeping land reforms and nationalisation.

1977: India’s former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is arrested in New Delhi on two charges of corruption while in office. She is released a day later.

1993: At least 12 US Army soldiers are killed in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, in a 15-hour battle with supporters of Somali warlord General Mohammed Farah Aidid.

1994: Jordan and Israel sign peace agreement.

1995: Former US football star OJ Simpson is acquitted of the 1994 slayings of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

1996: US President Bill Clinton and the foreign ministers of Great Britain, China, France and Russia sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty forbidding all testing of nuclear weapons.

1997: Earthquakes in central Italy injure 20 people and cause further damage to the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi, damaged by earthquakes a week earlier.

1999: For the first time in post-war Austria, nationalist Joerg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party wins second place in parliamentary elections, positioning him for negotiations on participating in the next government.

2006: A Turkish man hijacks a jetliner carrying 113 people from Albania to Istanbul and forces it to land in southern Italy, where he surrenders and releases all the passengers unharmed.

2007: About 3,000 miners are trapped underground when a water pipe bursts, probably causing a shaft to collapse in a South African gold mine.

2008: US enacts a historic $700-billion government bailout legislation for the battered financial industry.

2009: Iran’s president hits back at President Barack Obama’s accusation that his country had sought to hide its construction of a new nuclear site, arguing that Tehran reported the facility to the UN even earlier than required.

2010: Nigeria’s federal police force names two men as the “masterminds” behind the bombings that struck the West African nation’s capital of Abuja during its independence celebrations.

2011: A huge and powerful new telescope begins probing the universe from a high-altitude plateau in northern Chile, and astronomers hope it will reveal the earliest dawn of the cosmos.

2012: Turkish artillery fires on Syrian targets after shelling from Syria strikes a border village in Turkey, killing five civilians, sharply escalating tensions between the two neighbours and prompting NATO to convene an emergency meeting.

— AP

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Charles Camille St. Saens, French composer (1835-1921); Pierre Bonnard, French painter (1867-1947); Gore Vidal, US writer (1925- 2012), Chubby Checker, US singer (1941- ), Tommy Lee, drummer formerly w/rock group Motley Crue (1962- )