Today is the 346th day of 2017. There are 19 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1953: US test pilot Chuck Yeager reaches Mach 2.3 (2.3 times the speed of sound) in a Bell X-1A rocket plane.

OTHER EVENTS

1574: Murad III succeeds as Sultan of Turkey on death of Selim II.

1642: Dutch navigator Abel Tasman discovers New Zealand.

1677: Brandenburg’s Frederick William I takes Stettin, Poland; Denmark’s King Christian V is defeated by Swedish forces at Cassel, Germany.

1742: French forces evacuate Prague, Czechoslovakia, and return to France.

1787: Pennsylvania becomes the second state to ratify the US Constitution.

1800: Washington, DC, is established as the capital of the United States.

1804: Spain declares war on Britain.

1870: Joseph H Rainey of South Carolina takes his seat in the US House of Representatives, becoming the first black congressman.

1875: Sultan of Turkey promises reforms throughout Ottoman Empire to meet rebel demands.

1887: Turkey appeals to Western powers to mediate its war with Russia.

1894: Japanese troops invade Korea.

1897: The Katzenjammer Kids, the pioneering comic strip created by Rudolph Dirks, made its debut in the New York Journal .

1899: African American George Grant receives the first patent for a golf tee.

1905: Russia’s Czar Nicholas II grants constitution in Montenegro.

1906: President Theodore Roosevelt nominates Oscar Straus to be Secretary of Commerce and Labor; Straus becomes the first Jewish Cabinet member.

1913: The Mona Lisa is recovered in Italy, two years after it was stolen from the Louvre museum in Paris.

1917: During World War I, a train carrying some 1,000 French troops from the Italian front derails while descending a steep hill in Modane; at least half of the soldiers were killed in France’s greatest rail disaster. Father Edward Flanagan founds Boys’ Town outside Omaha, Nebraska.

1920: Martial law is declared in Cork, Ireland.

1925: The first motel — the Motel Inn — opens in San Luis Obispo, California.

1935: Nationalists demand restitution of Egypt’s Constitution of 1923.

1937: Japanese aircraft sinks the US gunboat Panay on China’s Yangtze River. Japan later apologises and pays $2.2 million in reparations.

1946: A UN committee votes to accept a six-block tract of Manhattan real estate offered as a gift by John D Rockefeller Jr to be the site of UN headquarters.

1947: The United Mine Workers union disaffiliated from the American Federation of Labor.

1963: Kenya becomes independent within British Commonwealth and a republic a year later.

1969: Greece, under fire on charges of violating human rights, withdraws from the Council of Europe before it can be expelled.

1975: Sara Jane Moore pleads guilty to trying to kill US President Gerald Ford.

1977: The dance movie Saturday Night Fever, a Paramount Pictures release starring John Travolta, premieres in New York.

1985: An Arrow Air charter flight crashes after take-off from Gander, Newfoundland, killing 248 American soldiers and eight crew members.

1989: British begin forced repatriation of Vietnamese refugees from camps in Hong Kong.

1990: Bangladesh’s deposed President Hossain Muhammad Ershad is put under house arrest.

1992: A strong earthquake kills 2,500 people on Flores Island, eastern Indonesia.

1993: President Boris Yeltsin wins approval of his new constitution, but extreme nationalists and Communists make a strong showing in Russia’s first multiparty elections since the 1917 Revolution.

1994: The Brazilian supreme court acquits former President Fernando Collor de Mello of corruption charges.

1997: Russia reaches an agreement with the International Monetary Fund for $1.7 billion in loans, giving the state a chance to pay back wages to millions of public employees. Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the international terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal”, goes on trial in Paris on charges of killing two French investigators and a Lebanese national. (Ramirez was convicted, and is serving a life prison sentence.)

1999: A Maltese-registered tanker, the Erika, breaks in two during a violent sea storm off the northwest coast of France, spilling some 3 million gallons (11.4 million litres) of heavy oil.

2000: The US Supreme Court reverses the Florida Supreme Court’s order to begin manual recounts of presidential votes in certain counties and Democrat Al Gore concedes defeat to Republican George W Bush.

2003: Germany says it will build a national memorial to homosexuals persecuted or killed under the Nazis, complementing the planned German memorial to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived.

2004: Mexican authorities request a local warrant for the arrest of former Guatemalan Interior Minister Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz, who is wanted in Spain for his alleged role in the 1980 attack against the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala.

2005: Anti-Syrian journalist Gibran Tueni is killed in a car bomb in Lebanon on the day the United Nations is expected to release a follow-up report implicating Syria in the slaying of a former Lebanese prime minister.

2006: Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, known as “the butcher of Addis Ababa”, is convicted of genocide in a rare case of an African strongman being held to account by his own country.

2007: A car bomb attack kills one of Lebanon’s top generals, Brigadier General Francois Hajj, and his driver. The blast was the first such attack against the Lebanese army, which has remained neutral in Lebanon’s year-long political crisis. US Republican presidential rivals gather in Johnston, Iowa, called for deep cuts in federal spending in a debate remarkably free of acrimony. President George W Bush vetoes a second Bill that would have expanded government-provided health insurance for children. Ike Turner, the rock pioneer and ex-husband of Tina Turner, dies in San Marcos, California, at age 76.

2008: A British jury decides that a string of police failures caused the death of a Brazilian electrician shot by anti-terror police on July 22, after being mistaken for a suicide bomber.

2009: E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled sceptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages do not support claims that the science of global warming was faked.

2010: Israel’s leader dismisses a call from a key government partner to share the holy city of Jerusalem with the Palestinians, a reminder of the obstacles facing already troubled peace-making efforts.

2011: Convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal says he is surprised and somewhat disappointed that he did not get a new sentencing hearing in the racially charged US murder case that had kept him on death row for nearly 30 years.

2012: North Korea successfully launches its first satellite into space, heightening concerns it has moved one step closer to being capable of lobbing nuclear bombs over the Pacific. Pope Benedict XVI sends his first tweet from his new account; it reads, “Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.”

2013: The sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial says he suffers from schizophrenia and hallucinated while gesturing incoherently just 3 feet (1 metre) away from President Barack Obama and other world leaders, outraging deaf people worldwide who said his signs amounted to gibberish.

— AP