Today is the 276th day of 2018. There are 89 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

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 Novenmber 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.

1932: Iraq joins League of Nations as British mandate ends.

1935: Italian forces invade Ethiopia.

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.

1945: US President Harry Truman warns Congress that “atomic force in ignorant or evil hands could inflict untold disaster upon the nation and the world”.

1952: British test their first atomic bomb off coast of Australia.

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

1973: The Austrian Government curbs group transit of Soviet Jewish emigrants through Austria, and says it will close Israeli-run facilities that house emigrants awaiting transfer to Israel; after hostages are taken by Arab guerrillas.

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.

1981: Irish nationalists at Maze Prison near Belfast, Northern Ireland, end seven months of hunger strikes that claimed 10 lives.

1990: East and West Germany are united.

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 O J 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 Nuclear 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.

1998: 10,000 Turkish soldiers cross into northern Iraq to attack Kurdish rebels.

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.

2000: A Palestinian gunman fires on an Israeli outpost in the West Bank, drawing return fire and disrupting a ceasefire the sides had hoped would end five days of bloodshed.

2003: Pakistan successfully test-fires a nuclear-capable Hatf-III missile with a range of 290 km (180 miles). The range is great enough to allow it to hit important Indian targets.

2004: Two of Spain’s most wanted alleged terrorists, and at least 16 other suspected members of the armed Basque separatist group ETA are captured in a vast French-Spanish police operation.

2005: Hundreds of Africans rush a security fence at the border between Morocco and a Spanish enclave, creating a surge in a recent wave of immigrants seeking a foothold in Europe.

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 US$700-billion government bailout legislation for the battered financial industry.

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.

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- )

— AP