Today is the 303rd day of 2017. There are 62 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2012: Sandy, the worst storm in decades to strike the densely populated US East Coast, floods New York’s subway, leaves millions without power, kills at least 182 people and causes US$65 billion in damages.

OTHER EVENTS

1270: The eighth and last Crusade is launched.

1697: France signs the Peace of Ryswick, ending the War of the Grand Alliance between France on one side and England, the Netherlands, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire on the other.

1817: Simon Bolivar organises independent government in Venezuela.

1888: In London, Jack the Ripper murders his last victim.

1918: Czechoslovakia is proclaimed an independent republic.

1928: Experimental transmission of still photographs by television begins in Britain.

1930: Treaty of Friendship between Greece and Turkey is signed in Ankara.

1938: The US radio play, The War of the Worlds, starring Orson Welles, airs on CBS. The live drama, which employed fake news reports, panicked listeners who thought its portrayal of a Martian invasion was true.

1945: The US Government announces the end of shoe rationing.

1961: The Soviet Union tests a hydrogen bomb with a force estimated at 58 megatons, an action condemned throughout the world; the Soviet Party Congress unanimously approves a resolution ordering the removal of Josef Stalin’s body from Lenin’s tomb.

1974: Muhammad Ali knocks out George Foreman in the eighth round of a 15-round bout in Kinshasa, Zaire, to regain his world heavyweight title.

1978: US President Jimmy Carter signs a law allowing the deportation of all naturalised US citizens who had engaged in Nazi atrocities.

1983: A powerful earthquake hits eastern Turkey, killing over 1,300 people in Erzurum and Kars provinces.

1989: Riot police in Moscow repeatedly charge and club demonstrators following a candlelight vigil outside KGB headquarters in memory of Stalin’s victims.

1992: Heavy fighting breaks out in Luanda, the capital of Angola, between the Government and the Union for the Total Independence of Angola. The conflict rages for three days, claiming at least 1,000 lives, until both sides establish a truce on November 1.

1995: Quebec votes against separation from Canada by 50.6 per cent to 49.4 per cent.

1997: Sri Lanka’s air force begins recruiting women to train as pilots for cockpits left vacant by the deaths of airmen in the country’s 14-year civil war.

1998: In Nicaragua, a mudslide caused by Hurricane Mitch kills at least 2,000 people on the slopes of the Casitas volcano in Posoltega.

1999: The last Indonesian troop ship sails out of East Timor, ending a bloody 24-year military engagement in the now independent nation. Some 200,000 East Timorese and 5,000 Indonesian troops had perished since the Indonesian invasion of the former Portuguese colony on December 7, 1975.

2004: Ukrainians vote in a presidential election closely watched by the West for signs of whether the former Soviet republic is committed to democracy and whether the country that sprawls between Russia and NATO’s eastern flank will tilt toward the Kremlin.

2007: Six French charity workers have been charged with kidnapping after a failed attempt to leave Chad with 103 children that an aid group said are orphans from Sudan’s Darfur region, Chadian authorities say.

2008: A US federal jury convicts Charles McArthur Emmanuel, the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, in the first case brought under a 1994 US law allowing prosecution for torture and atrocities committed overseas.

2009: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is confronted repeatedly by Pakistanis as she ends a tense, three-day tour of the country, chastised by one woman who said a US programme using aerial drones to target terrorists amounted to “executions without trial”.

2010: Yemeni police arrest a woman on suspicion of mailing a pair of bombs powerful enough to take down aeroplanes, officials said, as details emerged about a terrorist plot aimed at the US that exploited security gaps in the worldwide shipping system.

2011: The ruling conservative party’s candidate declares victory in Bulgaria’s presidential run-off after exit polls indicated he had won handily and his socialist challenger conceded defeat.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Irish author-politician (1741-1816); Feodor Dostoyevsky, Russian novelist (1821-1881); Ezra Pound, US poet (1885-1972); Louis Malle, French film director (1932-1995); Henry Winkler, US actor (1945- ); Diego Maradona, Argentine soccer star (1960- ).

— AP