Today is the 309th day of 2019. There are 56 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2013: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford acknowledges for the first time that he smoked crack probably “a year ago” but refuses to resign as leader of Canada’s largest city.

OTHER EVENTS

1605: English authorities arrest Guy Fawkes, the leader of the “Gunpowder Plot” to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

1630: Treaty of Madrid ends Anglo-Spanish War.

1688: William of Orange lands in Tor Bay, England, heralding the start of the Glorious Revolution whereby he becomes William III of England.

1817: Third Mahratta War against British in India begins with attacks on Poona, Nagpur and Indore.

1872: Suffragist Susan B Anthony is fined US$100 for attempting to vote in a US presidential election. She never pays the fine.

1895: George B Selden of Rochester, New York, receives the first US patent for an automobile.

1914: France and Britain declare war on Turkey; Britain annexes Cyprus.

1950: US General Douglas MacArthur reports massing of Chinese in North Korea.

1956: Britain and France land troops in Egypt during fighting between Egyptian and Israeli forces around the Suez Canal. A ceasefire is declared two days later.

1962: United Nations General Assembly demands all nuclear tests cease by January 1, 1963.

1967: An Anglican bishop announces his resignation in protest against South Africa’s apartheid system.

1978: Former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi makes a major political comeback, winning a seat in the lower house of Parliament.

1985: The UN General Assembly approves a resolution calling on Vietnam to withdraw its forces from Cambodia.

1987: South Africa releases Govan Mbeki, an African National Congress leader and colleague of Nelson Mandela, after 23 years in prison.

1988: Algeria’s President Chadli Bendjedid appoints former head of military security to form new government in wake of widespread riots.

1990: Rabbi Meir Kahane, 58, founder of the militant Jewish Defense League and Israel’s extremist anti-Arab Kach party, is assassinated in New York, allegedly by an Egyptian-born US citizen.

1991: Billionaire publisher Robert Maxwell is found dead in waters off Canary Islands where his yacht had been cruising.

1992: In its first free elections since 1981, Ghana’s leader Jerry J Rawlings becomes president.

1993: Talks are held on restoring ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in Haiti.

1994: Former US President Ronald Reagan, 83, discloses he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

1995: A draft peace accord presented to the parties in Bosnia excludes Serb leader Radovan Karadzic from power.

2001: Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega Saavedra, who led the country’s Marxist-leaning Government from 1979 to 1990, is defeated in election by businessman Enrique Bolanos Geyer.

2004: Abimael Guzman, the founder of Peru’s Maoist Shining Path Insurgency, goes on trial in a civilian court after his life sentence by a secret military court is overturned.

2006: Saddam Hussein is sentenced to death by an Iraqi court for crimes against humanity, closing a quarter-century-old chapter of violent suppression by the former dictator.

2007: A Chinese satellite — the Chang’e 1, named after a mythical Chinese goddess who flew to the moon — successfully enters lunar orbit, a month after rival Japan put its own probe into orbit around the moon.

2009: Saudi Arabia sends fighter jets and artillery rounds across the border into northern Yemen in a military incursion apparently aimed at helping its troubled southern neighbour control an escalating Shiite rebellion.

2010: Death toll in Indonesia surges to 122 after largest eruption of the Mount Merapi volcano in a century .

2014: Amid Ebola disaster, World Health Organisation picks new chief to take over Africa office that has been accused of bungling response to outbreak in its early stages.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Philippe de Plessis-Mornay, French author (1549-1623); Will Durant, US historian-philosopher (1885-1981); Roy Rogers, former US cowboy actor (1912-1998); Elke Sommer, German actress (1940- ); Art Garfunkel, US pop singer (1941- ); Tatum O’Neal, US actress (1963- ); Sam Shepard, US actor/playwright (1943-2017)

— AP