Today is the 274th day of 2015. There are 91 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2008: The last czar and his family were victims of political repression, Russia’s Supreme Court rules, formally restoring the Romanov name and furthering a Kremlin effort to encourage patriotism by celebrating the country’s czarist past.

OTHER EVENTS

1596: Duke of Norfolk is imprisoned by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth for attempting to marry Mary Queen of Scots.

1800: Spain cedes Louisiana to France in a secret treaty.

1887: Baluchistan is united with India.

1927: Russian-Persian non-aggression pact is signed.

1928: Soviet Union inaugurates first five-year plan to increase farm and industrial production.

1936: General Francisco Franco is named head of state in the part of Spain under Nationalist control.

1953: United States agrees to give France US$385 million in aid to train and equip more Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian troops and increase temporary French forces in Indo-China.

1964: The US Free Speech Movement is launched at the University of California at Berkeley.

1970: Egypt’s Vice-President Anwar Sadat succeeds the late Gamal Abdel Nasser as president.

1971: Walt Disney World opens in Orlando, Florida.

1978: South Pacific archipelago of Tuvalu, formerly the Ellice Islands, becomes independent from Britain.

1986: Former US President Jimmy Carter’s presidential library and museum is dedicated in Atlanta.

1989: Denmark becomes the first nation in the world to allow homosexuals to marry; Communist East Berlin permits exodus of about 7,000 East Germans to the west.

1990: Minority Serbs in Croatia proclaim autonomy.

1991: US President George H W Bush condemns the military coup in Haiti, suspending economic and military aid and demanding that President Jean-Bertrand Aristide be returned to power.

1992: Vice-President Itamar Franco takes over from Brazil’s impeached President Fernando Collor de Mello.

1993: At a conference in Washington, 43 countries pledge nearly US$2 billion to bankroll Palestinians as they prepare for home rule.

1994: The US National Hockey League team owners begin a 103-day lockout of their players.

1996: The UN Security Council lifts sanctions against Yugoslavia in recognition of Serbia’s role in helping bring peace to Bosnia.

1997: The founder of the militant Hamas movement, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, is freed from Israel’s Ayalon prison and flown to Amman, Jordan.

1998: Indonesia offers East Timor wide-ranging autonomy, bringing a possible conclusion to 20 years of civil war on the island.

2001: A Pakistan-based militant group attacks the state legislature in Indian-ruled Kashmir, killing 40 people.

2003: President Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front party wins a majority in the parliamentary elections. It is the nation’s first multi-party legislative elections since independence from Belgium in 1962.

2004: A suicide attacker carrying a bomb in a briefcase strikes at a Shiite mosque crammed with worshippers in eastern Pakistan, killing at least 25 people and wounding more than 50 during prayer service.

2007: A volcano erupts on Jabal al-Tair, a tiny Yemeni island in the Red Sea, collapsing part of the island, covering the rest with lava, and forcing the evacuation of a small military base.

2009: Death toll climbs to more than 1,000 after a 7.6 magnitude earthquake ripples through Sumatra, the westernmost island in the Indonesian archipelago.

2010: American scientists deliberately infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis 60 years ago, a recently unearthed experiment that prompted US officials to apologise and declare outrage over “such reprehensible research”.

2011: President Hamid Karzai gives up trying to talk to the Taliban, saying in a video that Pakistan holds the only key to making peace with insurgents and must do more to support a political resolution to the war.

2012: A manifesto complaining about Iran’s stumbling economy addressed to the labour minister gets 10,000 signatures in one of the most wide-reaching public outcries over the state of the country’s economy.

2013: UN says sectarian bloodshed in Iraq has surged to levels not seen since 2008 with more than 5,000 people killed since April.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Richard III, king of England (1452-1485); Paul von Hindenburg, German president (1847-1934); Ferdinand Foch, French soldier (1851-1929); Graham Greene, British writer (1904-1991), Don McLean, US singer (1945- )

— AP