Today is the 31st day of 2019. There are 334 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1865: The House of Representatives passes a US constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.

OTHER EVENTS

1606: Guy Fawkes, convicted for his part in the “Gunpowder Plot” against the English Parliament and King James I, is executed.

1709: British sailor Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, is rescued after being marooned on a Pacific island for four years.

1865: The US House of Representatives joins the Senate in passing the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolishing slavery, sending it to states for ratification. (The amendment is adopted in December 1865.).

1917: During World War I, Germany serves notice that it was beginning a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.

1928: Leon Trotsky is expelled from Soviet Union.

1934: President Franklin D Roosevelt signs the Gold Reserve Act.

1943: German troops surrender at Stalingrad in World War II.

1945: Private Eddie Slovik becomes the only US soldier since the Civil War to be executed for desertion.

1949: The first US TV daytime soap opera, These Are My Children, is broadcast from the NBC station in Chicago.

1957: Trans-Iranian pipeline, from Abadan to Tehran, is completed.

1958: First US earth satellite, Explorer I, is launched at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

1961: NASA launches Ham the Chimp aboard a Mercury-Redstone rocket from Cape Canaveral; Ham is recovered safely from the Atlantic Ocean following his 16 1/2-minute suborbital flight.

1962: Foreign ministers of Organization of American States vote to exclude Cuba from participating in the inter-American system.

1966: Soviets launch Luna 9, which makes the first successful soft landing on the moon.

1971: Astronauts Alan B Shepard Jr, Edgar D Mitchell and Stuart A Roosa blast off aboard Apollo 14 on a mission to the moon.

1990: McDonald’s restaurant opens in Moscow.

1992: US President George H W Bush asks the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Libya.

1995: The Mexican peso strengthens when US President Bill Clinton announces a multi-billion-dollar credit package aimed at helping Mexico out of its financial crisis.

1996: In one of the worst attacks in Sri Lanka’s 12-year civil war, Tamil separatist rebels ram a truck packed with explosives into the central bank, killing 88 people and injuring more than 1,400.

1997: Mexican drug kingpin, Juan Garcia Abrego is sentenced to 11 concurrent life prison terms and fines that total nearly $500 million.

2000: Japan promises six million yen (US$57,000) to North Korea to help preserve ancient tombs near the Stalinist nation’s capital. North Korea hopes to have the tombs of Goguryeo, which contain 1,500-year-old murals, added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list. An Alaska Airlines MD-83 jet crashes into the Pacific Ocean off Port Hueneme, California, killing all 88 people aboard.

2001: A Scottish court convened in the Netherlands convicts a Libyan intelligence officer of murder and sentences him to life imprisonment for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people. A second Libyan is acquitted.

2008: President George W Bush, speaking at the Nevada Policy Research Institute, says he would not jeopardise security gains in Iraq by withdrawing US forces too quickly. Pop star Britney Spears is taken from her home by ambulance to UCLA Medical Center, where she was held for a week for psychiatric evaluation.

2013: Chuck Hagel emerges from his gruelling confirmation hearing before the US Senate Armed Services Committee with solid Democratic support for his nomination to be President Barack Obama’s next defence secretary. A gas explosion causes three floors of the headquarters of Mexico’s national oil company Pemex to collapse, killing 37 people. Caleb Moore, 25, an innovative freestyle snowmobile rider who’d been hurt in a crash at the Winter X Games in Colorado, dies at a hospital in Grand Junction.

2017: US President Donald Trump nominates Neil Gorsuch, a fast-rising conservative judge, to the US Supreme Court. Singer and bassist John Wetton of the rock group Asia dies in Bournemouth, Dorset, England, at age 67.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Franz Schubert, German composer (1797-1828); Anna Pavlova, Russian ballerina (1885-1931); Norman Mailer, US writer (1923-2007); Carol Channing, actress (1921-2019); Suzanne Pleshette, US actress (1937-2008); Justin Timberlake, US singer (1981- ); Minnie Driver, actress (1970- ); Portia de Rossi, actress (1973- ); Kerry Washington, actress (1977- )

— AP