Today is the 206th day of 2019. There are 159 days left inthe year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1978: The world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, is born; a 5-pound, 12-ounce (2.58-kilogramme) healthy girl delivered by Caesarean section in Lancashire, England.

OTHER EVENTS

1593: France’s King Henry IV becomes a Roman Catholic for the second and final time in an effort to gain Paris and be recognised as the legitimate king.

1689: France’s King Louis XIV declares war on Britain after England, the Dutch and the Austrian Hapsburgs unite in the Grand Alliance to resist Louis’s expansionism.

1792: Austria’s Duke of Brunswick issues manifesto threatening destruction of Paris if France’s royal family is harmed. This assures the fall of the monarchy when agitators decide this is proof of Louis XVI’s traitorous dealings.

1878: China’s first diplomatic mission to United States arrives in Washington.

1894: The Japanese navy defeats a Chinese fleet in Kanghwa Bay, sparking Sino-Japanese War over influence in Korea.

1943: Benito Mussolini is forced to resign as prime minister of Italy during World War II.

1952: Puerto Rico becomes a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.

1956: Italian liner Andrea Doria and Swedish ship Stockholm collide off coast of North America. Fifty lives are lost.

1968: Pope Paul VI bans all artificial birth control methods for Roman Catholics.

1969: The Guam Doctrine — also known as US President Richard M Nixon’s Doctrine — is first publicly proclaimed: At its core is the notion that there is a five-sided power balance in the world — the United States, Russia, Japan, Western Europe and China — and that US allies should do more to defend themselves.

1971: Dr Christiaan Barnard transplants two lungs and a heart into a man in Cape Town, South Africa, and the operation is described as successful.

1973: Federal judge rules that US Government must halt bombing of Cambodia on grounds it is “unauthorised and unlawful”.

1988: A group of 700 Aborigines riot in Geraldton, Western Australia, following the funeral of an Aboriginal man who died in police custody.

1991: Mikhail Gorbachev tells Communist Party leaders that building communism in the Soviet Union is no longer a realistic goal and that party must reject “outdated ideological dogmas”.

1992: Italian Government sends 7,000 soldiers to Sicily in a Mafia crackdown.

1996: A hijacker holds an Algerian jetliner for five hours at an airport in western Algeria before he is overpowered. All 232 people aboard are unharmed.

1997: The Khmer Rouge guerrillas in Cambodia hold an apparently fake trial of their former leader Pol Pot, who is sentenced to house arrest.

1998: Government officials say US President Bill Clinton has been subpoenaed to testify in the Monica Lewinsky case.

2000: An Air France Concorde travelling to New York crashes into a hotel outside Paris shortly after take-off, killing 113 people.

2002: Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen accused of conspiring with 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, withdraws his guilty plea in a US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia.

2003: Argentine President Nestor Kirchner revokes a decree that prohibits the extradition of Argentine officials accused of torture or murder during the 1976-83 military dictatorship’s “dirty war” against leftist opponents.

2004: Israelis form a human chain stretching 55 miles (90 kilometres) from Gaza to Jerusalem to protest Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Gaza Strip withdrawal plan, as violence leaves six Palestinian militants dead and five Israeli children wounded in the bloodiest clash in the West Bank in a month.

2006: Thousands of opposition supporters in Congo clash with riot police, burning President Joseph Kabila’s campaign posters before historic weekend elections meant to bring lasting peace to the nation.

2010: President Hugo Chavez threatens to cut off oil sales to the United States if Venezuela is attacked by its US-allied neighbour Colombia in a dispute over allegations Venezuela gives haven to Colombian rebels.

2012: North Korea ends weeks of speculation by confirming that the mystery woman beside young leader Kim Jon Un at recent public events is indeed his wife, “Comrade Ri Sol Ju”.

2013: A Spanish train that hurtled off the rails and smashed into a security wall as it rounded a bend was going so fast that carriages tumbled off the tracks like dominos, killing 80 people and maiming dozens more.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Arthur J Balfour, English statesman (1848-1930); Maxfield Parrish, US illustrator/painter (1870-1966), Davidson Black (1884-1934), Canadian physician/anthropologist, Elias Canetti, Bulgarian writer and Nobel laureate (1905-1994); Estelle Getty, US actress (1923-2008); Iman, Somali model/actress (1955- ); Matt LeBlanc, US actor (1967- ).

— AP